New York, USA – Cybersecurity company HUMAN, formerly known as White Ops, has announced a US$100m growth funding round led by WestCap with additional investment from NightDragon and other current investors to support the company in its next phase of growth.

For Tamer Hassan, co-founder and CEO of HUMAN, said funding will help expand their leadership position as a cybersecurity firm to build a more secure and more human internet.

“HUMAN plays to win through collective protection by verifying the humanity of 15 trillion interactions per week, enabling us to defeat attackers–changing the odds to the side of the good,” Hassan said.

Some of HUMAN’s efforts to solve enterprise-wide pain points include its product offerings MediaGuard for Ad Security that protects digital media and advertising from fraud and abuse, BotGuard for Applications that protects sites and applications from digital fraud and abuse, and BotGuard for Growth Marketing that protects digital marketing investments from fraud and abuse.

Some of the cybersecurity endeavors HUMAN had executed include taking down PARETO—a sophisticated CTV botnet—in cooperation with Roku and Google and disrupting botnet 3ve, bringing together the FBI, Google, Facebook and many others in the industry.

Meanwhile, Dave DeWalt, founder and managing director at NightDragon and vice chairman of the board of HUMAN, commented that since they have engaged with HUMAN over the past year, they have proven to the industry that they are best positioned to stop these cybersecurity threats by stopping attacks at the source.

“Through our experience in engaging with hundreds of enterprises and their cybersecurity teams, we know that automated attacks on applications and websites creating fraud and abuse is a critical point of risk to every enterprise,” DeWalt concluded.

Singapore – HUMAN, a cybersecurity company and formerly White Ops, has launched a new program that aims to defraud connected television (CTV) systems, in partnership with the newly-launched initiative ‘The Human Collective’ composed of Omnicom Media Group, The Trade Desk, and Magnite, as well as support from Google and Roku.

The launch of the program was in response to the spread of PARETO, a botnet that, according to nearly a million infected mobile Android devices, is pretending to be millions of people watching ads on smart TVs and other devices. The botnet used dozens of mobile apps to impersonate or spoof more than 6,000 CTV apps, accounting for an average of 650 million ad requests every day.

PARETO worked by spoofing signals within malicious Android mobile apps to impersonate consumer TV streaming products running Fire OS, tvOS, Roku OS, and other prominent CTV platforms. The botnet took advantage of digital shifts that were accelerated by the pandemic, hiding in the noise in order to trick advertisers and technology platforms into believing ads were being shown on CTVs. 

HUMAN’s research arm Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team found the PARETO operation in 2020 and has been working with the HUMAN team to prevent its impacts on clients ever since. The operation is named for The Pareto Principle, an economics concept that dictates that 80% of the impact in any given situation is carried out by only 20% of the actors.

“CTV provides massive opportunities for streaming services and brands to engage with consumers through compelling content and advertising. Because of this opportunity, it is incredibly important for the CTV ecosystem and brands to work together through a collectively protected advertising supply chain to ensure fraud is recognized, addressed, and eliminated as quickly as possible,” said Tamer Hassan, CEO and co-founder at HUMAN.

HUMAN also observed a far smaller but connected effort attempting to spoof consumer streaming platforms. The operation detected a single developer on Roku’s Channel Store with apps connected to PARETO. The apps linked to the developer, impacting less than one half of one percent of Roku’s active devices globally, were designed to communicate with the server that operates the PARETO botnet. The primary operation was associated with 29 Android apps and the secondary operation was associated with one Roku developer delivering the malware to infected devices.

“What’s especially striking about this operation is its scale and sophistication. The actors behind PARETO have a fundamental understanding of numerous aspects of advertising technology, and used that to their advantage in how they hid their work within the CTV ecosystem. Their efforts included low-level network protocol spoofing, which is especially hard to detect, but which our team at HUMAN spotted,” said Michael McNally, chief scientist at HUMAN.

The Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team used numerous tools to identify the sources of the botnet, whose information has been shared with law enforcement.

Singapore – Video advertising solutions Aniview has partnered with global cybersecurity company White Ops to protect its client’s ad inventory through White Ops’ ad verification feature.

Through the partnership, Aniview will integrate the White Ops Advertising Integrity solution to help optimize protection and ensure its customers’ safety from malicious and sophisticated cybersecurity risks. As a result, publishers and advertising networks have another avenue by which they can access White Ops protection for their inventory. 

Furthermore, Aniview and its customers can leverage White Ops’ privacy-sensitive detection technology to identify threats and automated fraud attempts, ensuring their advertising inventory can be trusted and fraud-free. This then allows Aniview to provide its clients an effective solution to identify and prevent malicious video-bot traffic. The partnership represents the next step in Aniview’s mission to provide verified traffic and protection against video ad fraud. 

“The most common types of video fraud occur when malicious fraudsters misrepresent their display units as video inventory in programmatic exchanges. These sophisticated bots are deployed through malware embedded in software, essentially performing device-hijacking on a mass, organized scale. With the significant dangers ad fraud poses to the video supply chain, safety has become an increasingly critical issue and, as such, dangers are being met with innovative solutions,” White Ops said in a press statement.

White Ops operates two key features for video advertisers to use: White Ops Advertising Integrity, where platforms can tap into comprehensive pre-bid prevention and post-bid detection capabilities to verify the validity of advertising efforts across all channels, and the White Ops Fraud Mitigation Platform, which spots and stop sophisticated bots and fraud by using technical evidence, continuous adaptation, machine learning, and threat intelligence. 

“We’re excited to join together with Aniview in the optimization of fraud-free video advertising solutions. This partnership strengthens our presence in digital video while providing easier access to our platform for publishers and networks. The more partners that we have in this fight, the bigger our knowledge base grows and the better we can optimize our tactics against potential new threats from bad actors,” said Ellie Windle, vice president, global strategic partnerships and alliances at White Ops.

Meanwhile, Roy Cohen, CTO of Aniview commented that the recent partnership with White Ops responds to the greater need for protection against ad fraud as online video content is booming.

“Working with White Ops and our internal fraud detection tools, we will develop greater application integrity by identifying and blocking bot traffic with the highest degree of accuracy and speed to stay ahead of adversaries,” Cohen added.