NEW YORK, April 25, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading ad management platform Vindico, announces that it has identified six malicious and highly aggressive botnets and crawlers, used to commit impression fraud, through its highly sophisticated bot detection technology. In Q1, these six fraudulent software applications are responsible for nearly one billion fraudulent video ad 'bot' impressions, which are ultimately never seen by a human viewer.

Through extensive data research from Q1 2014, Vindico has made the following discoveries that affect the video ad market:

• Vindico identified four major botnets spanning over 700,000 infected machines (Zombie Computers) responsible for a projected annual estimate of over 3 billion impressions in the industry
• Vindico identified two major covert crawlers operating in over 10 datacenter clouds responsible for a projected annual estimate of nearly 2 billion impressions in the industry
• Bot detection within Vindico's Adtricity^TM shows an overall growth trend for bot impressions of 531% over the course of Q1

"Fighting fraud at a domain by domain level is ineffective and costs advertisers both time and money," said Matt Timothy, president, Vindico. "To truly change the foundation of this industry, we must identify the sources of these botnets and cut the money directly from them. Vindico has built an adaptive technology that can detect those root sources and we are giving the tools back to the advertisers to fight back."

Vindico's bot detection technology, developed specifically to help advertisers combat fraudulent activity in the video ad space, is most powerful from the buy-side platform as it is organically integrated from the point of delivery and can be used across the full scope of their buy.

In general, there are three types of bots: crawler/spider, covert crawlers and botnets. As detailed in a recently released Vindico data report, not all bots are malicious. However, the sophistication of Vindico's detection technology allows them to classify the different types of bots that are passing through Vindico's proprietary Adtricity ^TM system, and identify the malicious covert crawlers and botnets. Through the Vindico platform, ad buyers are provided with effective tools to eliminate these malicious covert crawlers and botnets at the source.

The full report can be viewed here.

About Vindico
Vindico is the first ad management platform dedicated exclusively to video and currently manages more than one-third of all digital video ads in the US. Vindico's enterprise platform for brands and agencies provides a single solution to deliver, create, measure and buy all of their digital video ad activity. Through proprietary technologies such as Adtricity^TM and the Vindico Bid Manager, Vindico builds a safe and trusted market for media investment and industry growth. For more information, please visit www.vindico.com and follow us on Twitter @Vindico_group.

SOURCE Vindico