Welcome to Inside AdSecure, our ongoing series that dives into different aspects of the platform, to ensure our partners always get the most out of our solution. 

In this installment we’re diving into AdSecure’s comprehensive (and always growing) proxy network, particularly the strategic advantage that comes from analysing your creatives with residential proxies as a means of uncovering every threat, no matter how well hidden. 

The Fundamentals: How residential proxies take ad security to the next level

Unlike a standard proxy network that consists of a small range of IPs, a residential proxy network is made up of IP addresses provided by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to homeowners in a particular location. Residential proxies are legitimate IP addresses attached to a physical location, so depending on which location you are looking at, the number of IP addresses could be anywhere from ten thousand to ten million. 

How does this impact ad security and quality challenges? The effective use of residential proxies is key to stopping one of the most evasive attack methods cyber criminals can deploy: ad cloaking via IP blacklisting. 

Cloaking with IP blacklisting relies on determining which IP addresses continually monitor ad campaigns, like those of an ad operations team or even all datacentre proxies in a particular location. After these IPs are known, a fraudster can add them to a blacklist in order to display a clean ad to the IPs they want to hide from, while delivering a malicious ad to the target audience: the users engaging with the ads. This is a highly effective way of delivering malicious threats while avoiding detection, optimising the likelihood that the malicious campaign will go undetected for a longer period of time. 

Using residential IPs for monitoring ads takes the concept of IP blacklisting and makes it almost impossible to use with any effect. By using the IPs of tens of thousands of residents in that location to monitor for digital threats not only will compiling a blacklist for cloaking become an exhaustive task, it also renders it counterproductive to do so, as now it’s the IPs of the same end user targets the bad actor needs to blacklist. 

Scanning with residential proxies on AdSecure is easy to set up: whether you are setting up a dedicated project for continual analysis or using our quickscan option, simply choose the “Residential” location options in the project or quickscan set up section:

And then select the countries you want to monitor, either by searching for the specific location, our selecting from the menu:

The Pro-tip: Use your residential IP bandwidth when it matters most
We regularly advise our partners to perform analysis using residential proxies in several key scenarios. There can be a higher level of risk of attack, for example, with campaigns where the offers inside are rotating quite frequently. It is also a good practice to check campaigns that are coming from sources with a previous history of malicious activity, and from new third party partners, where the relationship is still developing trust and confidence. 

AdSecure is dedicated to maintaining a comprehensive proxy network that includes datacentre, residential and mobile carrier proxies, and we frequently add new locations to each so that you can keep your ads secure and your users protected. So with that in mind, here’s a sneak peek at the new residential proxy locations we are in the process of adding this week:
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jamaica, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Macedonia, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan

If you want to learn more about the most effective way to utilise our residential proxies when analysing your creatives,  please contact us at support@adsecure.com