Botlab patch #1: block AWS IP ranges entirely

Advertising that is delivered to Amazon instances are non-human traffic 100% of the cases and pose a real threat to the integrity of investments advertisers, investors and suppliers are making in digital media . These instances are connected to an IP address in 100% of the cases and these IPs addresses have to be publicly listed and used for industry-wide blocking in routers or other access points to supplier systems..

A recent WSJ article shares insights to the magnitude of the problem here.

The good news for marketers, however, is that fake traffic coming from Amazon servers is relatively easy to weed out. Since there is little real or “good” traffic coming from Amazon’s servers, Fraudlogix advises marketers to simply not show ads on traffic originating from those servers. Doing so could eliminate over 7% of fake traffic affecting online advertising, the company said. (from the source at WSJ.com) 

To solve this problem, an up to date .json for all AWS IP ranges can be found here.

You can download full list of IP addresses here (12,333,440 rows). Please don’t use this for blocking, but use the file at the source instead. This file is for research purpose only and is part of a larger block list botlab.io will make available later in June 2015.

Below you can find the list of the IP ranges in a list format.

Applying this list to your system will immediately make the AWS related mechanical ad fraud problem go entirely away, except in those cases where a proxy server is used. A later botlab.io technique will reveal a similar list of common proxy servers the adversaries may use.

This list consisting only of AWS cloud occupied IP addresses are 100% of the time non-human.

These are many easy ways to apply the list at various levels of your system:

• Router
• .htaccess
• propriety blacklisting capability
• etc.