NEW YORK, July 07, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- HUMAN Security, Inc., the trust layer for digital customer experiences in the agentic era, today announced that its Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team has identified and disrupted a coordinated connected TV device spoofing threat dubbed NewsJunkie, in which a group of sellers transacted high-volume, high-invalid traffic inventory masquerading as premium CTV content.
The operation exploits a structural reality of CTV advertising: it is among the hardest environments in digital media to protect. Unlike desktop or mobile advertising—on which JavaScript can generate rich detection signals—a substantial share of CTV inventory is delivered with no JavaScript, meaning far fewer signals are available. A sizable component of NewsJunkie-related traffic exploited this information gap. At its peak, NewsJunkie accounted for hundreds of millions to nearly two billion invalid CTV bid requests per day per seller.
“NewsJunkie reinforces a reality security leaders are increasingly confronting: invalid CTV traffic is not simply an impression-quality issue—it’s a supply chain security challenge,” said Will Herbig, Senior Director, Media Research at HUMAN. “Organizations need visibility across every intermediary involved in a transaction to identify hidden risks, validate trusted pathways, and prevent sophisticated operations from exploiting gaps in the ecosystem.”
NewsJunkie was characterized by two techniques:
- Bid requests spoofed device, app, and IP details through SSAI, giving the appearance of real household devices watching, but created entirely server-side.
- More evasive variant traffic was routed through residential IP addresses paired with forged CTV device information to evade origin-based detection.
These methods worked together to flood the supply chain with impressions that appeared to be premium CTV inventory from genuine households. That means that researchers had to analyze the end-to-end supply chain to expose the scheme, examining technical elements of bid requests to pinpoint which bids were highly unlikely to come from real humans watching on real devices.
“NewsJunkie is a reminder that today's most sophisticated ad fraud operations can blend into legitimate-looking supply chains,” said Lindsay Kaye, Vice President of Threat Intelligence at HUMAN. “What made this scheme particularly challenging was that no single signal revealed the fraud. As threat actors continue exploiting the complexity of CTV, visibility into the full supply chain is no longer optional; it's imperative for identifying coordinated fraud and protecting the integrity of digital advertising.”
Satori researchers have disrupted the NewsJunkie operation, and customers partnering with HUMAN for Ad Fraud Defense and Ad Fraud Sensor are defended against this threat. Satori researchers continue to monitor the threat actors for new adaptations, including migration to new app IDs, device strings, and seller accounts.
About HUMAN
HUMAN Security is the global leader in Agentic Trust, the emerging discipline that informs and governs how humans, bots, and AI agents operate online. For more than a decade, HUMAN has specialized in understanding and mitigating automated traffic risk at internet scale, helping enterprises, platforms, and digital ecosystems verify digital interactions and establish trust across the customer journey, from first ad impression to final transaction. Powered by one of the world’s largest behavioral signal networks, HUMAN analyzes over a quadrillion digital interactions each year to help customers distinguish legitimate activity from fraud, abuse, and automated manipulation so trusted interactions can move forward with confidence.
HUMAN delivers a unified trust layer for the agentic era—bridging security, marketing, and media with shared visibility, governance, and confidence in a world where humans and AI agents operate side by side. Learn more at humansecurity.com.
Contact information:
Masha Krylova, Director of Communications
press@humansecurity.com
