Your Privacy Matters

We use cookies to enhance your experience on our site and to support our marketing efforts. Please view our Privacy Policy for more information.

Manage Preferences

Automating Threat Detection: How Boltive is Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Reshape Ad Security

Posted

August 21, 2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a game-changer in the world of technology, redefining how computers learn from data and make intelligent decisions. With its ability to enable systems to improve their performance through experience, rather than explicit programming, AI has become increasingly popular and pervasive in the tech industry.

As the volume of data generated continues to grow exponentially and computational power advances, businesses are embracing AI to unlock new insights, enhance efficiency, and drive innovation across diverse domains. This transformative technology is shaping the future, revolutionizing industries, and paving the way for a new era of intelligent applications that augment human capabilities in unprecedented ways.

One of the most significant advantages of AI lies in its capacity to identify risk faster and more accurately than traditional methods. By analyzing vast amounts of historical data and real-time information, AI algorithms can detect patterns and anomalies that might otherwise go unnoticed or take a considerable amount of time for human analysts to identify.

In ad security, AI systems can swiftly detect and respond to threats by recognizing unusual patterns or malicious behavior. Boltive has leveraged the use of AI to better identify and mitigate risk resulting in safer and more efficient operations.

Boltive’s Security Response Platform


The Boltive team’s latest feature enhancement to its Ad Lightning product is the creation of the Security Response Platform (SRP). Built on a foundation of cutting-edge technology and a deep understanding of threat actors, the Boltive SRP is designed to detect and respond to threats in real-time, drastically reducing the time it takes to mitigate them.

Through the use of AI, the Boltive team has trained (and continues to train) the SRP in order to provide a layer of intelligence for the detection and blocking of threats. By feeding the SRP samples of existing and new threats, it begins to learn what features make up these threats and use these findings as unique identifiers or fingerprints. With this knowledge, the use of AI is leveraged in order to identify new threats faster. What used to take teams weeks, or even months to identify, is now achievable in mere minutes.

Because threat actors are continuously changing the way in which they attack, it is crucial that your ad security vendor is able to quickly identify and block any new iterations. The following steps are how a typical threat investigation is conducted manually.  

  • Detection: A researcher receives a client report or finds evidence of malicious activity through threat hunting
  • Research: The malicious event is investigated to determine the nature of the event and the proper response
  • Identification: A threat actor-specific process is undertaken to extract a signature from the event
  • Mitigation: Extracted signature is added to a denylist and deployed to clients

The SRP In Action

The Boltive team has been able to automate the threat investigation process via our SRP. See below for an example of the SRP in action.

Detection / Research
Boltive Threat - SamClub Sample 1
Boltive Threat - SamClub Sample 2

The images above are examples of actual malicious landing pages from a known threat called ScamClub. This is a well known phishing scam that uses a sophisticated multi-stage redirect payload that has signatures that rapidly change, sometimes multiple times per day.

Identification

Boltive SRP - Observables

As shown in this SRP screenshot, we break down a specific threat into an observable stack.  The platform then runs a script that looks at each component.  Based on our proprietary threat research it is able to extract new threat URLs and in real-time add the signature to our denylist to block the attack.

Mitigation
Boltive SRP - Threat code

This screen is showing the first stage, a packed loader. When this loader is executed, it unpacks into a script that loads the actual payload from a CDN. The SRP will extract the CDN signature from this loader and automatically add it to the denylist.

AI Driving the Charge in Ad Security

Just like in every other industry, AI is providing an exciting new set of tools to enhance operations. Here at Boltive, we are already seeing the benefits.  By continuously learning from new data and adapting our AI models accordingly, we are seeing significant improvement in our ability to safeguard our clients against malicious activities.  

As we look to the horizon, the future of AI in the ad security realm promises even more transformative advancements. The relentless evolution of technology will enable AI algorithms to become increasingly sophisticated in detecting nuanced and adaptive threats posed by cybercriminals. This will empower advertisers and publishers with an unprecedented level of defense against ever-evolving ad security risks.

At Boltive our use of AI and our continued advancements provide publishers with enhanced transparency, accountability, and the ability to respond in real-time to changes in the threat landscape. Looking ahead, we are already working on additional AI-driven enhancements to our SRP and are excited about the next wave of improvements we can bring to our customers.

Subscribe to our Newslettter

Subscribe to our Newslettter

Previous Post
Next Post

No More Posts...

We're fresh out of content!

You're all caught up!

All the news that's fit to print.