The online advertisement industry it seems can never breathe a sigh of relief. It is confronted with perennial challenges and numerous hurdles that it must devise solutions to stay afloat. The most recent challenge is proving to be a menace more for the publishers as compared to the marketers.

Fraud detection companies which are already wrestling with the menace of robots pretending to be humans have to confront a new nuisance of ad-injection, under which the browsers of the users are hijacked and the advertisements are packed into different sites without the permission or knowledge of the publishers.

Now, this is different to typical ad frauds involving bots that measure and observe the user behavior and then go on to impersonate them to defraud marketers, as ad injection indulges in concerted attacks that impact publishers by hijacking the ad real estate on their websites.

Also, under the siege from ad injection, the visitors using the website more often than not are forced to see duplicitous adverts that either appear on publisher’s websites where no ads are normally seen, or on many occasions may even be placed over authentic ads on the publisher’s site. This bears an adverse effect on the publishers who lose a substantial chunk of their ad revenue from this spurious practice.

Many experts believe that a concerted effort to crack down the menace of bots have led fraudsters to Ad-injection as in the long-term the value will increase primarily because in the ad bot technique new computers would have to be infected continually as soon as they are discovered. However, under Ad injection new machines need not be continuously infected.

The result is very evident as some people are shifting their payloads towards ad injection as they are earning more for less effort.

Online publishers are very worried and they should be as this trend is growing exponentially. These publishers are missing out on vital advertising revenue owing to ad injection. When we compare this with bot fraud, advertisers’ interests are impaired as they pay for illegitimate ads on the web pages, and the audience for these ads are artificially inflated. With ad injection however the publishers are more threatened as they can potentially lose out on ads which are placed in front of their users without the payment incurred reaching them, or when their ads are camouflaged or in many cases removed only to make way for the injected ones.

The winners emerging from all this volatility are the fraud detection companies as there are plenty of takers out there for the solutions which they provide and as the industry is becoming more observant, their chances to garner potential audiences increase.