Microsoft Monetize - Sherlock: Creative quality control
Microsoft Advertising takes malware extremely seriously, and we are actively working to be at the forefront of prevention in order to protect our customers.
We utilize our own automated creative scanning system, Sherlock, to detect malicious content and assist our human auditors with ad quality. Sherlock simulates real traffic as accurately as possible. Because we do not wish to describe our methods to any potential bad actors, we are not currently disclosing details of the process in our documentation. For more information, please contact our Anti-Malvertising team.
Note
During the Sherlock testing process, we are actually loading each creative a few times. Because of this, you may see some very minimal activity for inactive or unaudited creatives in reporting.
Malware policy
We have developed an Part of Service Policies to ensure that our clients are taking all the necessary steps to keep the Microsoft Advertising platform safe.
Contacting our team
If you have any malware related issues or questions, please complete our Customer Support form and select Anti-Malvertising as the Request Type. If you feel that your creative has been deactivated erroneously for loading a non-malicious domain, please open a ticket and provide your reasoning as well as contacts for the domain owner so that we are able to further investigate.
Violation reports and automated emails
Upon detecting a violation, our system will send an email to the client contact that we have for creative audit notifications. This email includes the reason for violation. For example, loading a blocklist SLD, as well as a link to a report showing a detailed call chain of the violation. This report is similar to the output that one would see while running a program such as TamperData or HTTPScoop and shows both the order of the calls as well as a column titled "cache", which has a cached copy of content loaded at each step. Please be aware that these cached copies could contain malicious components. These cached copies can be used for additional debugging on your end such as checking javascript that was loaded to determine a creative ID in another system.
Removing a domain from our blocklist
We build our blocklists from a variety of sources both internal and external. Our team investigates each of these domains, which remain blocklisted if we are unable to contact the owner and determine the validity. If you feel a domain has been incorrectly blocklisted, use our Customer Support form to open a ticket. Select Anti-Malvertising as the Request Type and provide reasons as to why the domain should be removed from our blocklist as well as contacts for the owner of the domain. Here are some examples of the details that swe will need:
- Domain owner and their main business website, business address, and any other details
- Direct contact for the owner of the domain (email is fine)
Once we have this information, we will reach out to the owner to determine if the domain can be removed from our blocklist. As a matter of policy, we blocklist as soon as we see a potential problem and then complete the investigation. This is to ensure that both your publisher relationships and reputation are protected!