Click Fraud

Wilbur, Kenneth C.; Zhu, Yi

doi:10.1287/mksc.1080.0397

Cited by 146 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…However, it also introduces a new type of cyber criminal activities called "click fraud". Click fraud is the practice of deceptively clicking on advertisements with the intention of either increasing third-party website revenues or exhausting an advertiser's budget [7]. Kshetri [8] examined the mechanisms and processes associated with the click fraud industry from an economics viewpoint.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Combating online fraud attacks in mobile-based advertising

Cho

Song

et al. 2016

EURASIP J. on Info. Security

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Smartphone advertisement is increasingly used among many applications and allows developers to obtain revenue through in-app advertising. Our study aims at identifying potential security risks of mobile-based advertising services where advertisers are charged for their advertisements on mobile applications. In the Android platform, we particularly implement bot programs that can massively generate click events on advertisements on mobile applications and test their feasibility with eight popular advertising networks. Our experimental results show that six advertising networks (75 %) out of eight are vulnerable to our attacks. To mitigate click fraud attacks, we suggest three possible defense mechanisms: (1) filtering out program-generated touch events; (2) identifying click fraud attacks with faked advertisement banners; and (3) detecting anomalous behaviors generated by click fraud attacks. We also discuss why few companies were only willing to deploy such defense mechanisms by examining economic misincentives on the mobile advertising industry.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Combating online fraud attacks in mobile-based advertising

Cho

Song

et al. 2016

EURASIP J. on Info. Security

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“…Similarly, an advertiser buying search ads risks extra expense if uninterested users, competitors, or fraudsters click or purportedly click. (Wilbur and Zhu, 2009) Here too, standard contracts require advertisers to pay even if the advertising leads to few or no purchases. In contrast, affiliate marketing payment is only due if a user makes a purchase-aligning advertising expense more closely with an advertiser's revenue and profit.…”

Section: Affiliate Marketing and Affiliate Fraudmentioning

confidence: 99%

Risk, Information, and Incentives in Online Affiliate Marketing

Edelman

Brandi²

2015

Journal of Marketing Research

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We examine online affiliate marketing programs in which merchants oversee thousands of affiliates they have never met. Some merchants hire outside specialists to set and enforce policies for affiliates, while other merchants ask their ordinary marketing staff to perform these functions. For clear violations of applicable rules, we find that outside specialists are most effective at excluding the responsible affiliates, which we interpret as a benefit of specialization. However, in-house staff are more successful at identifying and excluding affiliates whose practices are viewed as "borderline" (albeit still contrary to merchants' interests), foregoing the efficiencies of specialization in favor of the better incentives of a company's staff. We consider the implications for marketing of online affiliate programs and for online marketing more generally.

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“…A common scam linked to online advertisements is click fraud [29]. In this scheme, cyber-criminals first set up web pages and become publishers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Dark Alleys of Madison Avenue

Zarras

Kapravelos

Stringhini

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference

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Online advertising drives the economy of the World Wide Web. Modern websites of any size and popularity include advertisements to monetize visits from their users. To this end, they assign an area of their web page to an advertising company (so called ad exchange) that will use it to display promotional content. By doing this, the website owner implicitly trusts that the advertising company will offer legitimate content and it will not put the site's visitors at risk of falling victims of malware campaigns and other scams.In this paper, we perform the first large-scale study of the safety of the advertisements that are encountered by the users on the Web. In particular, we analyze to what extent users are exposed to malicious content through advertisements, and investigate what are the sources of this malicious content. Additionally, we show that some ad exchanges are more prone to serving malicious advertisements than others, probably due to their deficient filtering mechanisms. The observations that we make in this paper shed light on a little studied, yet important, aspect of advertisement networks, and can help both advertisement networks and website owners in securing their web pages and in keeping their visitors safe.

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Click Fraud

Cited by 146 publications

References 26 publications

Combating online fraud attacks in mobile-based advertising

Combating online fraud attacks in mobile-based advertising

Risk, Information, and Incentives in Online Affiliate Marketing

The Dark Alleys of Madison Avenue

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