How to stop rogue ads that can set you up for malware

The traditional approach of reporting sketchy content to a site’s owner — see, for instance, the 46 pages of posts flagging ”Disruptive Ads” on the popular travel site FlyerTalk, or the frustration publishers voice on Reddit’s AdOps subreddit — doesn’t work well when there are so many scammers who can cloak their identities so easily.

One answer is smarter screening of programmatic ads to catch the con jobs. Confiant, for example, offers an ad-industry equivalent of malware protection; Mangin said his company’s system can catch and stop a hostile ad before it can finish loading in a browser.

FlyerTalk’s parent firm Internet Brands, meanwhile, is now evaluating services from the ad-monitoring firms The Media Trust and GeoEdge, said spokesman Joe Ewaskiw.