The Dark Alleys of Madison Avenue

Abstract

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.

To Get Lost is to Learn the Way: An Analysis of Multi-Step Social Engineering Attacks on the Web

“…To interact with such attacks, StraySheep attempted clicking the back button for each web page and determined that the action led to other SE pages. Malvertisement Redirection We found 13 Malvertisement website redirect domains [36], [37] that also led users to other SE pages. Cryptojacking We found three Cryptojacking domain names that secretly used user's CPU resources to mine cryptocurrencies by injecting JavaScript codes.…”

“…Our study followed research ethics principles and best practices [5], [36], [37], [39]. While we conducted parallel crawling for various websites, each of our crawling sessions sequentially traversed web content on the same website, so only a restricted amount of traffic to the website was generated, which did not increase website workload.…”

Dine and Dash: Static, Dynamic, and Economic Analysis of In-Browser Cryptojacking

“…These websites are primarily torrent websites that serve illegal copies of movies and software. Moreover, 19% of websites were categorized as "Education", which can be attributed to the exploitation of trust by adversaries behind cryptojacking since educational sites are highly trusted [32]. Figure 1 shows the content-based categorization of 5703 websites in our complete dataset.…”

Clicktok

“…Several papers have highlighted the importance of the field of advertising and click fraud [44,50]. Keeping ad networks free of fraud is highlighted by the work of Mungamuru et al [37], who show that ad networks free of click fraud results in a competitive advantage over rival ad networks and thus attracts more advertisers.…”