Fighting Malicious Software

At Traffic Company we are driven to achieve the maximum result from all your (mobile) traffic and become the best partner for converting traffic. In order to achieve our ambitions we have developed many tools and features to benefit our affiliates. You are probably familiar with many of these, like our reports and promotions tools.

But one of our biggest features is operating completely hidden from our users. In fact you probably aren't even aware of this features existence. We call it the crawler and it has been built to scan every single offer in our system. Let me explain to you what's the purpose of this tool.

The Crawler

There have been malicious offers in the market for quit some time. While some have no problem with this, a lot of webmasters, media buyers and ad networks are trying to avoid them as much as they can. This has proven to be very difficult.

Traffic Company runs many self-built exclusive offers, over which we have full control. But we also run many other offers provided by over 4500 different advertisers. We have very little control over their content, and this is where the crawler comes in. This crawler has been custom built to simulate a wide array of devices, geo’s and mobile operators and check for:

• Malware / Viruses

• JavaScript alerts, prompts, confirms and onbeforeunload popups

• App-store redirects
• Auto downloads of apk or other files
- SMS links

When the crawler checks an offer, it follows all redirects until the final landingpage. Every single one of these pages is scanned. Once the final landingpage has been reached we also scan all pages linked from here. Each offer will be scanned multiple times a day with multiple devices, geo’s and carriers. When the crawler detects something suspicious , the offer will be disabled immediately. We even disable certain offers just for a particular source type (For example disabling offers with javascript alerts for popunder traffic only). In the previous month we have disabled over 150 offers!

In order to improve our crawl results even more, we are working hard to keep adding our own mobile proxies in more and more geo’s. With our own mobile proxy in a country we are able to simulate the (mobile) user experience even better, which will improve the quality and reliability of our scans.

With this tool Traffic Company has developed a great solution to fight against viruses, JavaScript alerts, app store redirects, auto-downloads or other malicious software. But before everybody gets too excited, I must be very clear; We cannot guarantee for 100% that there will never be any malicious software in our network, but we can guarantee for 100% that we do everything we can to avoid this!