Confiant: Confidently Leading the Way to Threat-Free Cyberspace

Malvertising is a type of cyber attack where malicious code or content is delivered through legitimate online advertising networks. Some attack variations force the browser to redirect the user to a malicious site or phishing attempt, others present fake content aimed to con the viewer into a fraudulent investment. It can steal identification, financial, and contact data, encrypt or delete information, change / hijack core computer functions, and even spy on a device’s location data without the owner’s knowledge or permission.

From an enterprise point of view, malvertising presents end point risk to individuals and devices that browse the internet. The Department of Defense, in late 2021, confirmed to Congress that it deployed various technologies to protect against online-advertising related malware and data collection threats. The risk of malvertising is real and growing, notably so over the past decade as the ad industry has dramatically expanded the scope and scale of its real time bidding infrastructure. This is where Confiant comes into the picture, with their first-of-its-kind technology integrated deeply into the ad tech infrastructure and offering the ad industry proactive threat detection and individual event blocking in real time. According to Louis-David, “LD”, Mangin, Co-founder, and CEO, “Digital ads was an unmapped threat vector before Confiant largely because of the complexity mitigating the incredibly high ratio of noise to signal in the ad tech infrastructure. It speaks volumes that our detection signals have consistently had 100% turnover every 24 months since Confiant’s inception.”

Surmounting the technical challenges required four years of rigorous R&D, where Confiant worked to figure out the right methods to connect into the ad tech infrastructure without amplifying the feedback loop to the bad actors, who in this vector benefit from being considered clients until their maliciousness is unmasked. Today those integrations handle several hundred billion events daily, enabling them with uniquely accurate data, such that Confiant was able to map the threat vector and published in 2021 a Malvertising Attack Matrix at matrix.confiant.com. As LD confirms, “Integrations are one of our superpowers. We have now built more than 130 integrations into the ad infrastructure, creating not just visibility, but control. Our patent pending real time blocking technology was an industry first and the landshift moment when the malvertising protection went from whack-a-mole to cat and-mouse.”