As reported previously by Infosecurity, hackers regularly target the real-world and cloud servers of ad farms, since it allows them to propagate large numbers of infected adverts to the clients of the ad farm's services.
Under the Symantec AdVantage service – which is cloud-based itself – the IT security vendor says it uses the latest malware detection techniques to spot malvertising streams in real time, and lock down any suspect streams as they happen.
According to the vendor – which has partnered with Armorize Technologies for the new services – AdVantage allows website owners to quickly, easily and cost-effectively mitigate malvertising threats.
Plans call for the service to be offered to online publishers and ad networks under six month free early access program starting next month, for which Symantec says it now accepting early registrations.
As well as generating regular reports, the vendor said the service supports a real-time performance dashboard, showing how and when malvertising has occurred by visually tracing - and identifying - the path plus source of infected advertisements.
Announcing the new service, Wayne Huang, Armorize's co-founder and CEO, said that up until now, even the largest publishers do not possess insight into exactly what ads are presenting to their visitors.
AdVantage, he explained, is the first of its kind to redefine visitor experience analytics, tracing ad analytics from the visitor perspective and asks the question ‘what do they see’ and expands to questions like ‘what is the quality and security of the content they see.'
Fran Rosch, vice president of Symantec's identity and authentication services, meanwhile, said that malvertising poses a serious risk to online publishers and their customers, reputation and revenue.
“Highly publicized malvertising infections can damage the reputation of even the most trusted online sites. Symantec AdVantage will provide ad publishers the tools they need to protect their businesses by fighting back against these threats”, he said.