Watch the webinar video, where we dive into the eight key trends highlighted in the report!
MCLEAN, VA., January 28, 2021 – The Media Trust, global leader in quantifying and controlling digital risk, today published new research analyzing malvertising attacks throughout 2020, The Changing Face of Malvertising. The research reveals a 724% increase in malware incidents in programmatic environments since 2014, and confirms that malvertising continues to plague the industry despite the introduction of new mitigation tools and techniques.
The uncertainty of social, political, and economic events throughout 2020 drove an unprecedented rise in fraud, malware, and disinformation across the web. The report highlights eight key trends that will be crucial in tackling malvertising in 2021:
- Resurgence in clickbait creative—27X growth
- Rise in inflammatory creative—almost doubled
- Longer, more frequent test phases
- Targeting of “at-home” environments—20X growth during pandemic
- Blocker and ad server evasion
- Enhanced cloaking efforts
- Landing page compromise—80% increase
- Ubiquity of fingerprinting
The dynamic, opaque nature of programmatic introduces security and data protection risks into digital advertising transactions. Adding to this the fact that revenue teams are responsible for making these security and privacy-based decisions presents an ideal scenario for bad actors.
“Despite new tools like creative blockers, malvertising continues to get exponentially worse,” stated Chris Olson, CEO of The Media Trust. “Until publishers and their AdTech partners identify and control the third-party code executing through their environments, they remain ideal targets for bad actors taking advantage of the programmatic ecosystem to propagate their misdeeds.”
Learn more by watching this webinar video featuring Pat Ciavolella, Director of Digital Security & Operations; Cory Schnurr, Head of Marketplace Innovation; and, Gavin Dunaway, Product Marketing.
About The Media Trust
The Media Trust is on a mission to make the internet a healthier, more valuable place for publishers and consumers. Working with the world’s largest, most-heavily trafficked digital properties and their upstream partners, The Media Trust delivers real-time security, data privacy, performance management and quality assurance solutions which help protect, monetize and optimize the user experience across desktop, smartphone, tablet and gaming devices. More than 600 enterprises, media publishers, ad networks/exchanges, and agencies—including 40 of comScore’s AdFocus Top 50 websites—rely on The Media Trust to protect their website, their employee internet use, their revenue and, most importantly, their brand. www.MediaTrust.com.
