For years, ad fraud has been one of the biggest sources of concern among digital marketers, and for good reason.
While the costs of ad fraud in dollars are impossible to determine precisely, the estimates are huge and by most accounts number in the billions of dollars.
Chances are if you’re an owner of a Mac, you don’t worry too much about malware and viruses. At least you didn’t before the Flashback trojan was found to have infected some 600,000 Macs that were part of a botnet.
The Flashback botnet made headlines, but many were quick to point out that the infected machines became vulnerable through Java, not Apple’s OS, suggesting that Apple wasn’t to blame.
Amazon is not just the kingpin of online retail. Increasingly, thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Seattle-based company is at the center of many companies’ clouds.
The rise of AWS is impressive, and Amazon owes much of its success to the breadth and depth of its cloud platform, which is used by hundreds of thousands of customers, large and small.
Two-thirds of consumers don’t know what a QR code is, and just 19% of UK consumers have ever scanned one. But with more and more businesses and marketers experimenting with QR codes, awareness and usage are almost certainly going to be rising.
That means one things: QR codes will increasingly be a viable target for hackers and criminals. In fact, according to antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab, they already are.
If you own a Windows-based computer, it may be hard to believe that many of your Mac counterparts don’t run antivirus software.
Viruses and malware are a fact of life for Windows owners, and as a
result, there is a sizable ecosystem of security software vendors whose
mission in life is to protect PC owners from the constantly growing
number of threats.
But Mac owners may be getting a taste of the hassles PC
owners have become accustomed to…
Malicious ads are on the rise and just as AdWords is an appealing platform for legitimate advertisers looking for a massive audience, Google’s self-serve ad service is a juicy target for scammers looking for the same.
From ads that hawk scammy get-rich-quick products to ads that lead users to web pages infested with malware, malicious ads pose a significant threat to Google. After all, if users come to fear where Google’s results (paid or unpaid) might lead them, Google risks losing one of its most valuable assets: the trust and confidence of its users.
Old media and new media may do battle in the quest for consumer eyeballs but they increasingly have a common foe: malicious ad buyers.
Last month, the New York Times fell victim to a sophisticated scam in which a scammer was able to buy ad inventory directly from the news giant posing as a past buyer of ads on behalf of VoIP company Vonage. The Times had to scramble to locate the malicious ad when legitimate-looking ads were swapped for malware-serving ads.
Everybody remembers Y2K. Some experts predicted that the inability of some computer programs to handle dates after January 1, 2000 would have a huge impact on civilization.
Some less-than-grounded people even went so far as to warn that civilization would essentially collapse. I recall reports of individuals loading up on food, water and ammo. I hope they had receipts and got refunds.