Almost one-fourth of video ads and 11 percent of display ads are viewed by fake consumers created by cyber crime networks seeking to take a chunk of the billions of dollars spent on digital advertising, according to a research report released on Tuesday. The 'White Ops'study was conducted by ANA (Association of National Advertisers) in August and September 2014. It analyzed 181 campaigns from 36 ANA member companies, which were tagged to identify bot fraud. During the study, 5.5 billion impressions in 3 million domains were measured over 60 days in line with industry spending patterns. Bot fraud originates from malicious sites with phony ad traffic that passes through both legitimate and "phantom" elements of the digital advertising ecosystem. Fraudsters collect payments from advertisers for non-human impressions.

The study found that botnet controllers hijack everyday consumers' identities and home machines to conduct ad fraud. Almost a quarter (23 percent) of video ad impressions were identified as bot fraud, and eleven percent of display ad impressions were classified as bot fraud.

Publishers who bought sourced traffic from a third party, as a means to drive additional unique visitors to their site, had a bot fraud rate of 52 percent on that sourced traffic, the report added.

Programmatic display bot traffic averaged 17 percent bot fraud, while bot fraud for retargeted ads was 19 percent.

The study also revealed that bot fraud levels vary across the day with peak activity occurring when users are sleeping, but their computers are still awake, between midnight and 7am. Additionally, impressions coming from older browsers such as IE6 (Internet Explorer 6) and IE7 had fraud levels of 58 and 46 percent, respectively.

In response to the findings, the ANA, in collaboration with White Ops, has created an action plan for the key industry players — advertisers, agencies, publishers — to substantially reduce bot fraud. The action plan includes key tactical advice on how to structure business operations in a way that will protect against ad fraud. Among the recommendations are:

• Advertise During Waking Hours
• Demand Transparency for Sourced Traffic
• Include Language on Non-Human Traffic In Terms and Conditions
• Announce Your Anti-Fraud Policy to All External Partners
• Use independent monitoring and conduct ongoing fraud analysis of advertising traffic