MMI Releases Report on Mainstream Developer Tools Enabling Large Scale Ad Fraud
NEW YORK, Sept. 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --
"In Plain Sight" Report Summary:
Bot traffic is any online activity performed by an automated process rather than human action. Bots are often associated with cybercriminals and malware, but our research confirms it is far easier to generate robotic activity with developer tools such as headless Chrome and Amazon Web Services.
Browser bots use automation tools such as Selenium, Puppeteer, and Playwright. These tools are developed and maintained by Google and Microsoft, and can be deployed at enormous scale using cloud computing technologies provided by Amazon (AWS), Google (GCP), and Microsoft (Azure). Puppeteer has been downloaded over 100 million times.
In this report, we describe what developer tools are capable of, show how they can be used to generate robotic traffic, and provide examples of how bots are inadequately handled by companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo. The intention of this report is not to shame individual advertising platforms or brands, but to demonstrate that the technological and economic barriers to commit ad fraud are very low.
https://www.methodmi.com/reports/in-plain-sight
From MMI Leadership:
"Research and intelligence gathering has been foundational in the development of MMI as a company and a utility product for all enterprises that interact with the web. The effects of automated bot traffic are large and difficult to measure, but we must work on operationally seamless solutions to address this problem while keeping human user privacy at the top of our minds." Praneet Sharma - Co-Founder and CTO
"Ultimately, to advertisers it is irrelevant if a bot is malicious or not. As an advertiser your concern should be not paying for them or letting them pollute your analytics." Marc Goldberg - Chief Revenue Officer
MMI:
Method Media Intelligence provides solutions to prevent undesired bot activity online. Founded by Shailin Dhar and Praneet Sharma, we verify the integrity of digital media and other online assets. Our patented bot detection technology detects headless browsers and data center activity on the web. We are based in New York City with offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, and London.
SOURCE Method Media Intelligence
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