By partnering with cybersecurity leader Confiant, Colossus SSP actively protects publishers and their users from online threats.
About Confiant
As the cybersecurity leader in detecting and stopping malvertising attacks, Confiant provides platforms like Colossus SSP with complete visibility into and control over their ads, remediating quality issues, privacy violations, and mis-categorizations. Confiant has built hundreds of integrations directly into the web’s ad tech infrastructure, giving an unparalleled view into the malware, scams and fraud serving through ads today.
The Challenge
Malicious advertising (aka malvertising) is a pernicious scourge in digital advertising. Each year, U.S. consumers lose significant sums of money to these crimes, which take a range of forms, from social engineering to malicious code, such as ransomware, that is embedded in ad creatives. According to Confiant’s “2023 Malvertising and Ad Quality Index”:
- One in every 79 impressions revealed significant security or quality issues, marking the highest rate observed since the previous peak in 2018.
- The quality violation rate in Q4 2023 also hit its highest level since 2018.
- In the second half of 2023, the industry-wide ad quality violation rate more than doubled from 0.63% to 1.57%.
- On average, one in every 384 impressions was a security risk to the user.
Most concerning, security and ad quality issues were on the rise.
In 2023, one in every 79 impressions was dangerous or highly disruptive to the end user.
Real Harm to Users, Advertisers and Publishers
The harm to everyday citizens is real. According to the FBI, U.S. consumers lost $12.5 billion to online scams in 2023, a 22% increase from 2022. Investment scams top the list, accounting for $4.6 billion of the losses. Once the scammers get their hands on the money, there is little to be done to retrieve it.
Ad quality issues harm advertisers and publishers equally. Advertisers purchase inventory via open exchanges in good faith, only to find their ads compromised by low-quality placements and malvertising. This not only damages consumer trust but also risks having reputable brands associated with harmful campaigns. Publisher face similar risks, as their inventory can be infiltrated with malicious ads that degrade user experience and tarnish their credibility.
Colossus SSP is dedicated to safeguarding the entire online advertising ecosystem. We aim to ensure that consumers have a secure experience, advertisers reach real people in brand-safe environments, and publishers receive quality ads that resonate with their audiences and earn a fair price for their inventory.
Given that we serve over 300 billion monthly impressions across more than 21,000 publishers, we sought an ad quality platform capable of addressing the unique advertising challenges at scale. Equally important, Colossus SSP wanted a proactive solution that scans creatives pre-bid rather than just reactive scans after an attack has already caused harm to consumers, advertisers, and publishers.
That’s When Colossus SSP Decided to Partner with Confiant
The Solution: Partner with Confiant, The Industry’s First Supply Chain Take Down
As the publishers of the industry’s leading ad quality benchmark report and threat map at Matrix.Confiant.com, Confiant spearheads the protection of users from criminals hijacking the ad tech supply chain. Colossus began evaluating Confiant’s product offerings to enhance its adoption of best-in-class technology solutions, ensuring top-notch service for its brand, agency, and consultancy partners.
Confiant defines two main categories of threats to advertising:
- Security violations attempt to compromise the user through the use of malicious code and other techniques (e.g., forced redirects, criminal scans, fake ad servers, fake software updates, and high-risk ad platforms).
- Quality Violations are non-security violations related to ad behavior, technical characteristics, or content (think heavy ads, misleading claims, video arbitrage, undesired audio, undesired video, and undesired expansion).
After reviewing Confiant’s research and testing its cutting-edge technology platform, Colossus SSP partnered with Confiant to integrate a comprehensive security solution into our business model. We aim to substantially improve both our Security Violation and Quality Violation Rates, delivering a superior experience for consumers, advertisers, and publishers while contributing to a safer digital advertising ecosystem.
In the fourth quarter of 2023, Colossus SSP began utilizing Confiant’s platform to scan all advertising creatives for a wide array of security threats, from criminal scams, forceful redirects, phishing and pixel stuffing, to ad stacking, fake download updates, and other nefarious activities.
Results
In the first quarter after adopting Confiant’s platform in Q4 2023, Colossus achieved industry-leading performance in protecting publishers. Colossus finished Q2 2024 with a “Security Violation Rate” of less than 0.002%, significantly lower than the current industry average of 0.19%, making Colossus 98.95% better than the industry average. In addition, in Q2 2024, Colossus “Quality Violation Rate” was 0.08%, 90.12% lower than the industry average of .81%.
About Colossus SSP
Colossus SSP, part of the Digital Direct Holdings (DDH) family of brands, is a Supply-Side Platform (SSP) for curated programmatic advertising. As the ninth Black-owned company to go public in the United States, Colossus is driven to ensure that the programmatic market is equitable to all publishers, advertisers, and communities. Learn more at colossusmediassp.com.
