News & events

Last week, we posted a release concerning a malicious attack directed at our network on Monday December 15. While our internal and external teams investigating this incident have made significant progress in identifying the sources responsible for propagating this act, our first priority was to stabilize the network to ensure that we kept the confidence of our advertisers and affiliates. We are pleased to report that our network has been restored to full operating capacity and that we have implemented and will continue to deploy measures that ensure that a similar event does not occur again.

During our investigation and with the assistance of members of network and the support of many in the industry who have reached out to help us deal with this situation, we have determined that this attack might not have been an isolated event. It has come to our attention that in the days leading up to this attack, another chain of events occurred which we believe was connected to the outage on last Monday. In what we believe was a deliberate intent to monetize traffic using our network and other networks, malicious code was embedded into banner advertisements that were then served, using third parties, to many publishers outside of our affiliate network. This code had the effect of redirecting traffic from these external publishers to other sites, as determined by the person(s) responsible for this act. This action was done without the knowledge or involvement of CX Digital Media, and was carried out using third party systems unrelated to CX Digital Media and our network. The portion of the traffic that waredirected through our network did not present any unusual patterns that would have triggered concern, making it virtually impossible for us to detect this scheme.

We believe that the surge in volume that impacted our network last Monday was caused by either (1) an escalation of this scheme that resulted in a .snowball. effect; or (2) a defensive or punitive measure directed at our company by persons who wrongly believed our company to be somehow involved in this scheme. However, at this point there remains too many unknowns to identify the root of these actions with any degree of certainty. We would like to reiterate our thanks to all of our affiliates, clients and partners for their help over this past week. Their insight and support has been invaluable in identifying the issues leading up to last Monday.s event, in solving the issues once encountered and in setting up a plan to ensure that these types of attacks don.t happen in the future. We are grateful for the continued confidence that you have placed in our network.

Rafael Alter
CX Digital Media
866-962-976