Holidays and Malicious Ads — go together like peanut butter and jelly.
Or, maybe like afternoon tea and cucumber sandwiches if you look at the data from this weekend!
Most folks in Ad Operations have a war story or three in dealing with malicious ads. It’s almost become too predictable. It usually goes something like this. Holiday weekend. Ad operations folks (like every other human being in media) are out of the office on a much deserved vacation. Bad actors ready their attacks for weeks prior to pulling the trigger. Attacks are initiated and scale throughout the weekend. Usually senior executives see them before anyone else (why does that always happen?). End users flock to Twitter to ask (and beg) publishers to make it stop. Rinse and repeat next holiday weekend.
This weekend was just like most other holiday long weekends. It has been a quiet few weeks leading up to this weekend. Our data at clean.io showed that we had a bit of a calm before the storm leading into the weekend.
In looking back at the last two weeks of data — on Wednesday we witnessed a 100% increase day over day compared to Tuesday — and on Friday we saw our biggest day of threats prevented in the previous 10 days. Saturday and Sunday were both very active days — very reminiscent of the attacks we witnessed on Presidents’ Day weekend in February in the United States. Sunday’s threat level showed almost a 1000% increase versus the same day last weekend. But this attack was different than the one in February, which seemed to be squarely targeted at the United States. It seems the bad actors now have a global holiday schedule they are following.
Our friends in the United Kingdom were also off this weekend with the Spring Bank Holiday falling on Monday May 27th — and it is no coincidence that we saw significantly elevated threat levels in Great Britain this weekend!
Take a look at the chart above, you’ll see a significant ramp across our Threat Network in Great Britain on Saturday, and increasing on Sunday. As an overall percentage of the redirects we saw on Sunday, Great Britain accounted for 36% globally. On Friday, Great Britain accounted for less than .5% of all redirects across our entire Threat Network — so, a major surge noted as the weekend progressed. We saw increased threat activity also in countries like Canada, Italy, and Germany…but nothing like the outsized volume we witnessed in the United States and Great Britain.
Tactically, we saw the typical garden variety of malicious redirect ads impacting users and monetization. Based on my own experiences I likely won at least $5,000 in Walmart Gift Cards this Memorial Day weekend. Lucky me, right?
It also seemed like Facebook was having some sort of anniversary party this weekend too. 15 years? So soon? Glad Zuck invited me to that one — and to be just one of 30 people invited…again, so lucky! It is important to note that the bad actors have significantly upped their game in the creative department. These look more legit every day.
So — I’m sure there were plenty of new war stories written this weekend. And speaking of war stories on malicious ads — are you planning on attending AdMonsters Ops 2019 next week in New York? Our company (www.clean.io) will be sponsoring the conference and will be presenting a panel to discuss some of the war stories that publishers have in dealing with bad ads. I’ll be joined by Steve Mummey from Accuweather, Erik Requidan from Intermarkets, and Gareth Glaser from RTK.io. All have years of experience in trying to preserve their user experience and monetization as it relates to bad ads. Hopefully if you are there, you’ll join the discussion with us at 3pm on Tuesday June 3 — we’d love to hear your war stories as well. And, if you’d like to meet up at the show just let me know and I’d be glad to connect with you.
Hopefully you all had a restful few days, and if you didn’t — let us know how we can be helpful in preventing malicious ads from ruining your user experience and your monetization. Hit me at matt@clean.io — we’re here to help!