comScore knew they were buying a great brand when they agreed a deal to acquire MdotLabs last summer. Technology and the Internet have combined to create a vast digital world that’s growing every day – and MdotLabs used innovative techniques to focus on something very important: helping fight online fraud.

More specifically, we’re talking about protecting advertising companies from potentially malicious web traffic and ExactDrive is excited to be in partnership with mDotLabs (comScore).

Fraudulent attacks on the digital advertising industry are a big issue and, as such, protecting an advertising campaign has never been more necessary. Non-human traffic, click-farms and other shady bot-related activities gobble up roughly $14 billion in advertising spend. That figure is thought to amount to between 25% and 50% of ad spend per campaign.

So effective was MdotLabs’ operation, that comScore integrated their technology and techniques into its own pre-existing processes to combat this threat. Put simply, the acquisition means that MdotLabs’ methods can be used to help bigger (and more overall) clients.

But what are these technologies and techniques? MdotLabs used cyber-security methodologies such as signal processing, statistics, machine-learning and applied math to accurately identify a variety of malicious activities. But the innovation doesn’t end there. There was another reason behind the purchase – MdotLabs’ 12-strong team of data scientists can also investigate and experiment with new ideas for publishers and advertisers.

comScore have been going since 1999. Broadly speaking, comScore specialize in studying human behavior in the digital marketplace. More precisely, they are an information service – researchers who measure traffic and analyze data for some of the biggest e-commerce companies, digital advertising agencies and publishers.