Michaël Tiffany - White Ops
"Eliminating fraud on the Internet is only possible if all the actors share the value for a Safe and Trustable Internet".
President of White Ops, a cybersecurity company specialized in the fight against unwanted bots, Michaël Tiffany talks about his participation and his partnership with the AdTech Summit, and about the next challenges in terms of security on the Internet.
What is the meaning of your 2020 partnership?
Cybercrime is global, and White Ops is on a mission to make the Internet more secure by making cybercrime less profitable. The tools that we have armed our US-based clients with are turning the tide against ad fraud. We want to make those same tools available to the international brands and global advertising agencies headquartered in France.
We have long worked with a handful of pioneering French companies like Dailymotion and Havas Media Group’s Artemis. Now we are expanding in France in a dedicated, focused way.
What does the theme of shared values evoke for you?
In our field, eliminating fraud on the Internet is only possible if all the actors are playing ball together and share the value for a Safe and Trustable Internet. Brands, advertising platforms (Search, Social, SSP, DSP), publishers and advertising agencies have been and are crucial allies in our fight against fraud. Working together, we have defeated major scams like the Methbot spoofing operation, the 3VE botnet, and the Poseidon mobile app fraud. Those successes required the cooperation of many companies as well as law enforcement such as Europol and the FBI. But this fight it far from over. Our allianced must grow.
What are the issues for you? What are you looking for from this event?
The job is not done and fraud is moving from desktop to mobile, from mobile to connected TV. Fraud is becoming more “professional” moving from simplistic Invalid Traffic (IVT) to Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT) that becomes more difficult to catch as their masterminds evolve their schemes. Major platforms such as The Trade Desk, MediaMath, Yieldmo and many others are protecting inventory with bonafide cyber security defenses from White Ops and our allies. But anyone can claim they are fighting fraud effectively. It is crucial for brands and publishers to strongly embrace the fight and to stand up for the highest standards, which support the best ad performance and the best yield for real inventory.
What will be the core message of your intervention?
Since 2014, we have run a Bot Baseline study with the ANA and roughly 50 major brand advertisers, to study the impact of bots on digital advertising and to quantify the bot traffic that goes undetected and gets paid for vs the bot traffic that gets filtered out. At this event, Michael Tiffany, co-founder and President of White Ops, will give a detailed overview of the state of fraud in 2019-2020, what to expect in the coming year, how to fight and defeat the new frontiers of fraud. Thanks to all our clients, we look at 1 trillion actions on the Internet every week. This gives us a uniquely comprehensive view on fraud across desktop, the mobile web, mobile apps, and now also CTV and OTT. We want to share the knowledge.