BrightRoll

BrightRoll
Subsidiary
Industry Advertising
Founded 2006 (2006)
Founder Tod Sacerdoti and Dru Nelson
Headquarters San Francisco, California, United States
Parent Yahoo! (2014–2017)
Oath Inc. (2017–present)
Website www.brightroll.com

BrightRoll is a video advertising software system developed by a company that is owned by Oath Inc.. BrightRoll was founded in June 2006 by Tod Sacerdoti, the company's CEO, and Dru Nelson.[1] Its headquarters were in San Francisco, California, with offices across the United States, Canada, and Europe.[2]

In November 2014, Yahoo! announced that it would acquire BrightRoll for $640 million.[3]

Funding

BrightRoll raised $36 million in capital, with the last round of funding closing in November 2011. Principal investors include Dave Welsh, Adams Street Partners, Rob Theis, Scale Venture Partners, Evangelos Simoudis, Trident Capital and Jon Callaghn, TRUE Ventures.[4]

Products

The BrightRoll platform delivers, manages and measures the performance of digital video advertising campaigns across web, mobile, and connected TV.[5] According to comScore, BrightRoll reached the most unique viewers in the United States in 2013.[6][7]

The BrightRoll platform includes a real-time bidding marketplace and powers programmatic video for hundreds of buyers, including brands, agencies, agency trading desks (ATDs), demand-side platforms (DSPs), and advertising networks and enables them to connect with digital audiences to support advertising campaign objectives. Customers access the platform through the company's advanced programmatic buying console (self- or managed service) or connect server-to-server for real-time bidding. The platform gives publishers and software developers access to a video marketplace.[8]

Browser Hijacking Behavior

The company distributes software that is considered a browser hijacker (malware)[9]. With a minimally restrictive web-browser security setting, the webpage will be silently redirected to a Brightroll website, and a program hosted on the site will silently install itself on a user's machine when the user visits a web page that contains advertisements associated with the company. The advertisement contains embedded script that will display customized advertisements to the user based on the user's browsing history. The advertisements may appear in pop-up webpages. Video-based ads embedded in the page, will run without prompting by the user.

Additionally, the software, after installation on a user's machine, will lower the browser's security settings, so that the normal warning when visiting, or being redirected to, a suspect web page (e.g., one that is on a malware blacklist or with an invalid security certificate) will be disabled. The web page in question is then free to send the user's machine a payload of additional malware.

If the browser's security setting is restrictive, the redirect attempt will be thwarted, but the web page will display a pop-up that says, "the name on the security certificate is invalid or does not match the name of the site". Inspecting the certificate indicates that it is associated with *.btrll.com.[10]

If the user attempts to dismiss the pop-up, it will often repeatedly and block all user interaction with the browser, often to the point where the only way to recover is to kill the browser process through the operating system. The problem was originally observed on Yahoo-associated sites (e.g.,, Yahoo Mail) [11] but can appear on any web page that accepts a Yahoo-associated advertisement,

This problem is known to affect Internet Explorer 11 (and earlier): it does not occur with current version of Google Chrome. Ad blocker software will generally prevent this issue from occurring. If the software has been accidentally installed, it exhibits characteristics of malware in that it does not reveal its presence via the "Programs and Features" control panel application on Windows: malware-removal software must be used to locate it and remove it from the machine.

References

  1. ↑ "Form D: Notice of Sale of Securities" (PDF). US SEC. October 10, 2007. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  2. ↑ "History: Pioneering digital video since 2006". BrightRoll. Archived from the original on August 31, 2014. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  3. ↑ Trefis Team (November 12, 2014). "Yahoo Eyes Video Ad Dollars With BrightRoll Acquisition". Forbes. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  4. ↑ Connie Loizos (February 25, 2013). "Brightroll's Tod Sacerdoti on Acquisitions, IPOs, and the Company's Near Future". PeHUB. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  5. ↑ "BrightRoll", CrunchBase
  6. ↑ "comScore Releases December 2013 U.S. Online Video Rankings". Press release. ComScore. January 10, 2014. Archived from the original on January 16, 2014. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  7. ↑ Olga Kharif (January 30, 2013). "Google Fends Off BrightRoll in $7.6 Billion Video Market". Bloomberg Technology. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  8. ↑ "Engineered for advanced programmatic buying". Promotional web site. BrightRoll. Archived from the original on February 2, 2014. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  9. ↑ Btrill.com redirect virus. https://malwareless.com/btrll-com-redirect-virus-remove/ Accessed: Aug 10th 2017
  10. ↑ Security alert, bad certificate from btrll.com. https://forums.yahoo.net/t5/Temporary-Errors/security-alert-bad-certificate-from-btrll-com/td-p/41638 . Accessed: August 10, 2017.
  11. ↑ btrll.com certificate message: Norton Community. https://community.norton.com/en/forums/btrllcom-certificate-message Accessed 9/9/2017.
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