Spider.io

Spider.io is a company in London that specializes in the detection of malware and botnets that generate web traffic which is used for online advertising fraud. The company was founded in 2010, its founder is Douglas de Jager.[1]

Software that is used by this company includes Storm, off the shelf open source software that can handle large amounts of data, using solutions like Hadoop and later also Mahout. Spider.io did start writing software for online advertising fraud detection itself, but at a later point the choice of this off the shelf open source software looked more sensible.[2]

In 2012, spider.io pointed out a vulnerability in Internet Explorer because of which the mouse cursor position of the PC of a victim could be tracked by an attacker and it claimed that this vulnerability had been exploited at a large scale.[3][4]

An example of a botnet that was detected and analyzed by Spider.io in 2013 is the Chameleon botnet.[5]

Spider.io also raises awareness in general of how easy it is to generate fake web traffic, sharing information on techniques that can be used for that.[6]

In 2014 Spider.io was acquired by Google Inc.. At that time, the company had seven employees.[7] For Google inc. it is important that advertising fraud is eliminated from the internet. One of the reasons for that is that much of the income of the company comes from online advertisements. Besides the acquisition of Spider.io, it also employs many people to combat such fraud in other ways.[8]