• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, July 21, 2016

AerServ, a mobile-first video mediation platform, on Thursday announced a partnership with The Media Trust, a provider of real-time security and monitoring services for the digital ad industry. The goal of the partnership is to improve the ad environment for customers by automatically detecting and then removing suspicious or malicious advertising.

Using The Media Trust’s software-as-a service-based Media Scanner service, which offers 24/7 protection against malware that’s surreptitiously embedded in mobile ad tags, AerServ will proactively look for advertising that may harm the user experience or provide an unsafe environment. The capability will be offered to all AerServ clients.

One of the most common issues in mobile is auto-redirected creative and malware. A mobile redirect is a small piece of code embedded into an ad tag or recommended third-party content. When the infected ad or content appears on the screen, the user is suddenly redirected from the Web page they’re on to app stores, pornographic sites, or other unwanted content.

When The Media Trust’s Media Scanner service detects any suspicious or malicious ad tags, including mobile redirects, it will immediately notify AerServ of the suspicious activity so it can instantly remove and block bad creative.

More than 500 media publishers and their ad-tech partners—including AOL, Major League Baseball, OpenX, The Weather Channel, and Twitter—are already using The Media Trust to verify and secure their online and mobile advertising environments, Chris Olson, CEO and Co-Founder, The Media Trust, told Real-Time Daily via email.

Olson noted that “each year the number of ad-delivered malware infections increases.” What’s new is that “the presence of malware in the digital environment is no longer a topic relegated to digital media professionals—it’s become a mainstream and global issue.”

In his view, malvertising continues to grow for the following reasons:

• The complexity of the digital ecosystem makes it difficult to know when creative or ad tags are compromised.

• The variety of formats (video, HTML5, native, etc,) and channels (gaming consoles, Roku, IoT, etc.) provide new avenues for exploitation.

• It'sa security issue typically not addressed by security professionals, who don’t know how to prevent, detect or terminate infections.

• Lack of enforceable legislation to deter the serving of malicious content, so the financial benefits outweigh the cost of fines or penalties.