• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 30, 2024

Yahoo DSP will work with GeoEdge, which focuses on ad security and quality, to create a safer and more reliable ad environment for advertisers and their customers as malvertising remains a challenge across the advertising industry.

GeoEdge’s ad-quality service will ensure that ad creative running through Yahoo DSP is secure and free from malware and content risks.

As digital advertising faces increasing user experience and safety threats, the technology safeguards against malicious code, social engineering attacks, cloaking and sensitive advertising.

Ad-quality controls support Yahoo in protecting against high-risk and harmful creative content, including political and election ads. 

Security is important to Amnon Siev, GeoEdge CEO, who has been developing products and supporting sales for enterprise technology providers to secure a safer internet most of his life.

“As a father, it’s important for me that my kids have a safe internet environment that’s free of malicious ads and content,” Siev told MediaPost. “We all spend so much time interacting with the internet,” he said, for business and leisure.

Every child, parent, and friend should be able to open their phone, TV, or computer and experience a safe internet environment without being concerned the ad is infected with malware, he said.

That thinking created the goal for GeoEdge to ensure its customers and partners — platforms, publishers, app developers, out-of-home (OOH) and connected television (CTV) — across the digital ecosystem are free from malicious ads and content. 

When asked how he got into the security business, Siev said the first companies he worked for provided a range of solutions to support communications, including WiFi and business communications.

Yahoo DSP conducted an in-depth vendor assessment to find the solutions that would fit the company’s needs for addressing malware prevention, filtering sensitive ad content and integrating seamlessly into the company’s infrastructure with customized control capabilities.

The selection process included a rigorous evaluation and intensive engineering efforts to meet Yahoo DSP’s needs.

GeoEdge’s ad-security technology ensures Yahoo DSP that the ads being served — either directly or via programmatic channels — are free of malicious ads and high-risk content by analyzing ads before they are served.

GeoEdge also supports app developers with AppHrbr, CTV players, and OOH digital ads served in public spaces, as well as platforms and publishers.

This year, the company's biggest challenge and accomplishment has been its ability to address sensitive ad content, such as deepfake political ads and hate speech. This has been an issue with CTV, where security concerns are beginning to arise.  

GeoEdge security researchers also this year discovered the operations of ScamClub, a sophisticated cybercrime syndicate that manipulates VAST tags using obfuscated malicious scripts.

This tactic enables large-scale fraudulent redirects through video ad units, marking a critical evolution in the industry’s battle against malvertising.

The company's security researchers are addressing this shift with a focus on something Siev called malvertising-as-a-service (MaaS), especially as threat actors increasingly target video ads for higher financial gain.  

"As we look towards 2025, the biggest challenges are the increase in scammers and other nefarious actors who create deepfakes and salacious creatives to mislead consumers to click on their scams," he said. "We’re seeing programmatic criminal rings forming to take advantage of the opportunities in the open web."