In the past year, I found myself immersed in the multi-billion dollar digital advertising industry. This gave me the opportunity to investigate the unique security challenges and issues facing the industry. It was a shock to me at first how complex the advertising ecosystem was particularly in the advent of programmatic advertising. But I dove in head first and learned a lot which I would like to share with my fellow security professionals. During this time, I got involved with unscrupulous publishers, apathetic ad networks, angry advertisers and activist malware researchers. I encountered self proclaimed experts with fantastic claims, vendors using scare tactics, and a glaring disconnect between the security and ad tech worlds.
In this presentation, I would like to be able to provide the audience with my experience plus a number of things. Among which are: