Dive Brief:
- Fraud detection firm Fraudlogix studied two billion ad impressions over the course of a 30-day period, revealing that Amazon's AWS cloud service was the worst culprit in serving up fraudulent traffic.
- The cloud service served up 7.7% of what Fraudlogix called "bad" IP addresses and only 0.05% of the "good."
- Fraudsters find it easy to set up cheap servers in the cloud to deliver bot traffic -- making AWS an easy target.
Dive Insight:
The Fraudlogix study also found some of the largest Internet service providers carried the most fraudulent traffic, but also delivered the most "good" IP addresses thanks to their scale. In Amazon's case, its cloud computing platform was manipulated by fraudsters to create fake bot traffic dispersed across the Web.
The good news for marketers is that since only 0.05% of IP addresses from the Amazon cloud are legitimate, marketers can block Amazon all together and eliminate the 7.7% addresses that are fraudulent. With as much as 52% of purchased traffic coming from bots, eliminating that chunk from cloud fraudster could be a big help.
“It’s super easy to set up cheap servers in the cloud and to set up scripts and programs to create fake traffic,” Fraudlogix CEO Hagai Shechter told the Wall Street Journal's CMO blog. “AWS is a great service for a lot of reasons. The good guys love it and find it easy to work with, and the bad guys do too."