Understanding fraudulent activities in online ad exchanges

Stone-Gross, Brett; Stevens, R.; Zarras, Apostolis; Kemmerer, Richard A.; Kruegel, Chris; Vigna, Giovanni

doi:10.1145/2068816.2068843

Cited by 93 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…In particular, research has focused on the evolution of botnets towards ad related clickfraud monetization [1], [25] and the impact of botnet interventions on abusive ad traffic [6], [26]. Other forms of abuse include the failures of current ad exchanges to detect distributed clickfraud [33], the ability for compromised routers and opportunistic ISPs to inject ads into users' traffic [29], [34], and the market for impression fraud via ads hidden underneath other content or served in invisible windows [32]. In response, researchers have proposed an array of solutions that attempt to detect fraudulent ad traffic via bluff ads or anomaly detection [9], [10], [15], [17].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ad Injection at Scale: Assessing Deceptive Advertisement Modifications

Thomas

Bursztein

Grier

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

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Today, web injection manifests in many forms, but fundamentally occurs when malicious and unwanted actors tamper directly with browser sessions for their own profit. In this work we illuminate the scope and negative impact of one of these forms, ad injection, in which users have ads imposed on them in addition to, or different from, those that websites originally sent them. We develop a multi-staged pipeline that identifies ad injection in the wild and captures its distribution and revenue chains. We find that ad injection has entrenched itself as a cross-browser monetization platform impacting more than 5% of unique daily IP addresses accessing Google-tens of millions of users around the globe. Injected ads arrive on a client's machine through multiple vectors: our measurements identify 50,870 Chrome extensions and 34,407 Windows binaries, 38% and 17% of which are explicitly malicious. A small number of software developers support the vast majority of these injectors who in turn syndicate from the larger ad ecosystem. We have contacted the Chrome Web Store and the advertisers targeted by ad injectors to alert each of the deceptive practices involved.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ad Injection at Scale: Assessing Deceptive Advertisement Modifications

Thomas

Bursztein

Grier

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

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“…For these reasons, attackers are using advertisements to perform their attacks, and researchers have developed techniques to detect and block such malicious advertisements [17,29].…”

Section: Drive-by Download Advertisementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stranger danger

Nikiforakis

Maggi

Stringhini

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web

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URL shortening services facilitate the need of exchanging long URLs using limited space, by creating compact URL aliases that redirect users to the original URLs when followed. Some of these services show advertisements (ads) to link-clicking users and pay a commission of their advertising earnings to link-shortening users.In this paper, we investigate the ecosystem of these increasingly popular ad-based URL shortening services. Even though traditional URL shortening services have been thoroughly investigated in previous research, we argue that, due to the monetary incentives and the presence of third-party advertising networks, ad-based URL shortening services and their users are exposed to more hazards than traditional shortening services. By analyzing the services themselves, the advertisers involved, and their users, we uncover a series of issues that are actively exploited by malicious advertisers and endanger the users. Moreover, next to documenting the ongoing abuse, we suggest a series of defense mechanisms that services and users can adopt to protect themselves.

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“…Obviously, some criteria are required to detect these websites. One of the most common criterion is keywords such as "advertisement", "buy", "shop", "free", "join", "click", "now" (Wang et al , 2011 ;Li et al ,2012 ;Krammer ,2008 ;Stone-Gross .et al , 2011) .…”

Section: Disturbing or Useful Online Advertisementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Presenting a Fuzzy System for Identifying Persian Advertising Websites

Jelodar¹,

Mirabedini²,

Haroonabadi³

2014

MAS

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Online advertisement is a cheap and powerful tool which has targeted internet users. At the moment there is a multibillion dollar market for online advertising which is the main income of some popular websites. Some people use this cheap tool to achieve their personal goals i.e. they use incorrect advertisement techniques. For instance a user refers to Bing search engine and tries to search "Photoshop software download". The question is whether the returned results are related to the searched sentence or not. Unfortunately, there are some advertisement websites which use phony techniques (such as using fake key words) to attract users to their websites. Consequently, the user is not able to find his desired webpage and lose his time. In this paper Persian websites are investigated. A fuzzy system is proposed which performs identification and analysis of websites using two parameters; "url feature" and "number of important key words".

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Understanding fraudulent activities in online ad exchanges

Cited by 93 publications

References 12 publications

Ad Injection at Scale: Assessing Deceptive Advertisement Modifications

Ad Injection at Scale: Assessing Deceptive Advertisement Modifications

Stranger danger

Presenting a Fuzzy System for Identifying Persian Advertising Websites

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