Thousands of malicious in-app mobile ads are auto-directing users to porn sites, according to mobile ad intelligence and quality platform SafeDK.

The firm claims to have found this out through its user-level analysis technology, alongside its coverage of 400 million monthly active users, to track a specific ad journey. This then led SafeDk to uncover thousands of ads that auto-redirect users to porn sites.

According to the company, the ad networks that served the malicious ads were informed of the situation and provided with the information needed to manage the situation.

“In-app malicious and fraudulent code that ‘piggybacks’ on innocent ads and auto-redirect users to inappropriate sites has turned into an epidemic in the industry,” a press release from SafeDK said.

“Ad network SDKs are leaning on third-party programmatic solutions that are vulnerable to breaches and are exposed to manipulations.”

Crackdown

The news follows SafeDK revealing the release of its mobile user level ad journey, as part of its patent-pending ad-visibility technology.

The solution aims to help publishers track ads behind user complaints so they can resolve malicious ad’s sources, cut time spent by customer support and eliminate the need to reproduce the issue.

“The User Journey solution that we recently added to our overall Ad Intelligence platform is built according to top publishers requests and their customer support needs,” said SafeDK CEO Orly Shoavi.

“Since it was introduced to our first publishers, SafeDK User Journey was able to successfully resolve hundreds of user complaints.

“This has especially been apparent over the past couple of weeks when we uncovered thousands of auto-redirects to porn sites and helped the ad networks block their malicious source.

“The top industry players, both publishers and networks, are becoming aware of the importance of ad quality to their user experience and bottom line, and therefore take responsibility for the situation.”