Actually, there are several ways to detect such attacks. I work in network security and incident response, and I immediately recognized the URLs in the infectio

Actually, there are several ways to detect such attacks. I work in network security and incident response, and I immediately recognized the URLs in the infection chain from Figure 3 and Figure 20 in the whitepaper. They're using the Sweet Orange exploit kit, which has been around for a while and is not that hard to detect if you have any appliance screening HTTP requests and responses. Example URL patterns: http://malware-traffic-analysis.net/2014/10/06/index2.html http://malware-traffic-analysis.net/2014/10/06/index2.html Also, despite Invincea's claims to the contrary, good intelligence feeds and in some cases just proxy domain categorization are often fast enough to catch these for most organizations, at least in cases where the attack isn't specifically targeted at a single organization. This is on top of multiple layers of defense that any decent company should have, many of which could catch numerous indicators (domain patterns, URI paths, Javascript) tied to these exploit kits. The bidder has to prop up and supply the exploit kits themselves, and most of the time it's Sweet Orange, Nuclear, Rig, or Angler. But these are all "commodity" exploit kits and aren't even remotely custom made like they have been in some APT attacks. APTs may also go the ad bidding route and provide their own handcrafted exploit kits, but they may not want to go through a middleman like this and set up a corporate front. The only unnerving part is the ability to choose a specific target subnet. If the ad networks or second-tier middlemen of "spreaders" / "distributors" are promising clients exclusive access to a certain group of servers or even an entire ad network for a length of time, and if the client uses a specifically created new domain and maybe even a fresh IP, then that means no one may know about the compromised server/network until it's too late and several people from the targeted organization visit it. I don't know for sure since Invincea did not investigate more into the human aspect of this, but I suspect for this to be profitable there's probably a lot of "overselling" going on, and the bidders interfacing with the ad networks themselves are serving multiple customers' campaigns (or their own campaigns) on the same servers and ad networks, which makes it more difficult to successfully pull off targeted drivebys or "watering holes" as they will get detected and evicted. >I'm sure the talented people at the larger ad-exchange-software companies like AppNexus will figure something out - or they already have! AppNexus has been a major offender here for a long time. They've had numerous incidents of malicious ads over the years. I know because I've seen them myself when investigating malware incidents (e.g. adnxs.com as the Referer in an exploit kit chain). You can also see adnxs.com in Figure 21 of the whitepaper. I certainly hope they start caring more about security and establish a more stringent ad reviewal process.