Lesser known mobile adtech domains where data is sent

Summary

AppGoblin has now run over 40k apps in an emulator, tracking millions of API calls thousands of advertising domains. Unfortunately, some of them are dark, meaning they have no landing page of any kind, and I’m unclear who controls these domains. news-cdn.site marketingcloudapis.com kickoffo.site onegg.site lazybumblebee.com qa-analytics.com acobt.techyastatic.net Let’s see if we can figure them out! qa-analytics.com This one is a mystery. Seems like it’s related to Germany since it’s always resolving to HETZNER and german IPs. Checking the shared IPs, it looks like they do overlap with unity3d.com domains sometimes. Again, this whole list is games. data deep dive Looking at the requests I can match various keys to values from untiy3d.com API calls! Specifically they share the same `app_key` values. acobt.tech Well that name definitely comes off as esoteric at first. First let’s check the IP cluser and see what we find, of the 233 apps sending/receiving from acobt.tech we have 4 other sites with 1:1 matches that are all sites that do not have any landing pages. acobt.tech 233news-cdn.site 233inmense.site 232kickoffo.site 232 searching… Searching the internet shows various hits saying some of these belong to Bigo Ads. Let’s check the apps’ SDKs and see Apps Again we got lots of games, and looking it looks like AppGoblin has indeed already found that each of these has a Bigo Ad SDK. onegg.site Wait, this one also matches the IPs for the other various Bigo Ads. Seems like Bigo really uses a lot of random domains? lazybumblebee.com OK, great name. This one appears in clusters of SDK advertising, making me think it’s related to a mediation SDK of some kind (rather than to one specific ad network). Possibly this is bidmachine.io’s as it is the most common, but really all the top ad newtorks appear nearly 1:1 along side it across the 276 apps I’ve found it in:bidmachine.io 275unity3d.com 270doubleclick.net 269mtgglobals.com 267rayjump.com 267applovin.com 261vungle.com 257 E...