Ad Fraud Definitions

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Bot Networks [BN]: Traffic emanating from Global Bot Networks. Non human traffic designed to mimic users and inflate audience numbers. It's a network of compromised computers that work together to perform tasks that are assigned by the network’s controller.


Data Center [DC]: Traffic originating from a server in data-center or known cloud platform providers, rather than residential or corporate networks. Here the ad is not rendered in a user’s device (there is no real human user) .


Click Spam [CS]: This is a case where large numbers of fraudulent clicks are delivered without the user knowing and resulting in suspicious conversions.


Potentially Unwanted Content [PUP]: Traffic coming from redirect, pop and torrent domains. This Content contains adware, installs toolbars or has other unclear objectives.


Trojan [TA]: Traffic from Trojan infected machines. Basically Trojan is a type of malicious software that looks legitimate but It can take control your computer & damage Your important data.


Emulators: Traffic from systems who behave like Bsystems. An Emulator typically enables the host system to run software for the Guest System.


Good Bot [GB]: These are basically good bots which obey robet.txt directives and crawl the website to discover new and updated pages to be added to the Google index Good Bots help in creating visibility of the websites on the internet and help businesses to achieve an online authority.


Fake crawlers [FC]: Bots that do not belong to the (Google, Bing, Yandex etc), but they send themselves as good bots. Intention is to copy the content, increase the traffic, increase load on server etc.


Duplicate IP [DI]: This is when traffic is coming from duplicate IPs.


Scraper Bots [SB]: Bot known for data scraping, extracting the data from the website. This kind of traffic is blocked based on criteria such as geolocation and real-time blacklist. One such scraper bot is Bixo used for Web mining which steals the information without authorization.


Programmatic Traffic [PT]: This is a behavior analysis in which traffic engages with the website in a very programmatic manner.


Session Spam [SS]: This is when we start to notice when multiple sources are engaging from the same session which typical bot behavior


Spam Networks [SN]: Traffic emanating from Global Spam Networks. In this kind of traffic source can be spam websites/IPs .Real Spam is generally email advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or a newsgroup.


Iframe Content [IFC]: Brand content running in iFrame. This is when the publisher is promoting iFrame content which is not allowed by advertisers.


Public Web Proxy [PWP]: Traffic that is routed through an intermediary proxy device or network where the ad is rendered in a user’s device where there is a real human user


Tor Network [TEN]: Traffic getting emanating from Tor networks.Tor Network is also called Onion Router, contains routing technique to conceal information about user activity. This can be done by hiding your Machine IP address & Encrypt the data Using Encryption Keys.


Public cgi proxies [CGI]: More sophisticated type of proxy traffic where users are hidden under the IP address of the web server and making conversions from an unwanted GEO. CGI Proxy is designed to increase the Privacy On the Web by routing all traffic through Different Public servers and addresses.


Malicious: Traffic emanating from ad malware. Malicious traffic usually exhausts the  legitimate resources By sending a lot of traffic. Basically Malicious traffic means monitoring the flow of packets.



Deepankar Biswas "Deeps"