In December 2016, WhiteOps, a competitor to Integral Ad Science, announced that they discovered one of the largest botnet rings, costing the advertising industry upwards of $2-5m a day. Because IAS is in the business of detecting ad fraud, I enacted our crisis communications plan to inform key executive stakeholders, worked with product marketing and data science to understand the impact of this discovery on our business (if any), created a canned POV statement for our clients, and addressed any incoming press inquiries.

One of the press inquiries we responded to came from Sapna Maheshwari at The New York Times. I had established a relationship with her when she was working on an article around fake news. Her colleague, Vindu Goel, was looking for additional industry commentary. After quickly prepping David Hahn, our EVP, Strategy, we hopped on a call with Sapna and conducted an interview which led to a quote within the article.

"David Hahn, the executive vice president of strategy at Integral Ad Science, an advertising security firm that competes with White Ops, said the Methbot fraud affected just a tiny portion of the ad traffic of his own clients.

'There are new bots and new ways in which the bad guys are trying to figure out ways around our technology all the time,' he said."

Read the full article here on The New York Times.