What you don't know can hurt you

These days, it’s impossible to escape online advertisement. Advertisers are continually evolving ways to target and re-target potential customers. Some techniques are only known by people in the industry.

Mobile AD Identifiers (MAIDs) are unique identifiers assigned to mobile devices for advertising purposes, offering digital marketers’ ways to re-target ads, across platforms.

Each time you’re served an Ad, your MAID, along with identifying information, such as IP addresses, or exact geolocation are transmitted to the Ad server.

In this presentation, we explore the use of MAIDs for more nefarious use cases.

We’ll look at how MAIDs can be used in Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) investigations, deconstruct an app that uses a MAID provider’s SDK, and show you some real demonstrations of how scary online advertisement information can be.