In the summer of 2019, the STEP Network was hit with a wave of malicious redirect attacks that were so pervasive, the company’s AdOps team had to disable any advertisements that had the potential of being the entry point for attack. The disabled ads represented more than half of the company’s advertisements, and this ultimately resulted in them sacrificing a significant chunk of advertising revenue to preserve user experience while sorting out the problem.
Not only did STEP Network have to sacrifice revenue, but the AdOps team—about three full-time staff members—couldn’t focus on anything else during the attack. Every second of their time went to trying to find the problem and fix it.