Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out

DecryptAds is a new service designed to expose the complex ecosystem of adtech companies tracking users online. By scraping data from files like ads.txt, app-ads.txt, and sellers.json, it reveals a network of data brokers and advertising firms, many of which are based in countries with geopolitical concerns, including Russia, China, and the UAE. The service highlights ‘quiet removals’ – instances where ad networks silently remove malicious advertisers without public notification – and identifies AI-generated ‘slop’ websites used to deliver malvertising attacks. DecryptAds emphasizes the need for greater data-sharing within the adtech industry to combat these threats, particularly through the use of ‘supply chain objects’ (SCOs) that would reveal the full chain of actors involved in delivering malicious ads.