- All the methods that create each category of High Risk (Bot Traffic, Tunneled Traffic etc. see below) and are considered as High Risk.
Suspicious
- New methods that the Protected Media technology discovered. Those results will remain under ‘Suspicious Activity’ before being moved to ‘High Risk'.
- Methods which can indicate Invalid Traffic behavior, but may also be done by specific environments, usually not in web browsers.
- Methods which are strong indicators of bad behavior when occurring in high volume indicating systematic issues, but may be legitimate in lower scale. E.x. specific user behavior that in small amount is considered valid but in high occurrences can indicate systematic Invalid Traffic activity.
Advertising Bots are computer programs aimed to run in large scales as part of a network of coordinated machines called a botnet. They designed to simulate human users to create a virtual audience, which can achieve the campaign measurement goals, with little effort from the Invalid traffic provider's side. Many of the bots are PCs and handsets that have been infected by a virus and follow the bot operator's commands. There are many types of bots ranging from simple scripts to advanced impersonating bots, which can elude many security measures.
Hostile Tools
This type of Invalid Traffic masks the user viewing the ad, tricking the measurement systems to count as if they are accessing your ad from a different device. This can be done through a virtual machine, cell-phone emulator on a computer, a plugin or extension.
This happens when a user or viewer masks their Geo location. This is achieved by using a proxy or VPN to mask the IP address. Sophisticated methods include using peer-to-peer proxies, which allow the fraudster to use a real home PC with a real residential IP, which would typically not be blocked in "blacklists". This is generally used by "click-farms" which employ actual people to click on ads and install applications while impersonating users from desired locations.
The ad is viewed by a legitimate and self-declaring non-human. A perfect example would be Google's Search Bot.
The ad is deliberately displayed in a manner that is invisible to the human eye-such as being stacked below other ads on a page or appearing in an "invisible iFrame".
The ad is being displayed on a website, location, or application different from the one reported to the advertiser
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