Threats to Online Advertising and Countermeasures

Abstract

Online advertising, also known as web advertising or Internet marketing, is the means and process of promoting products and services on the Internet, and it has been one of the important business models for the Internet. Due to its lucrative nature and its large scale of adoption, it has also been a target for malicious parties with various attack aims such as getting a cut of online advertising revenues, obtaining a user's privacy, and spreading malware. Over the years, a great deal of research has been conducted on online advertising. Recently, the health of the online advertising ecosystem has become more of a concern for both advertisers and regular Internet users. Advertising budgets have been abused, and Internet users' privacy and security have been infringed. In this article, we broadly study threats to online advertising and trace the root causes from a systems point of view. Existing threat mitigation strategies are also reviewed and analyzed. To protect online advertising, which has been an essential funding source of many free Internet services, several challenges still need to be addressed, including the need for transparency of the advertising ecosystem and software vulnerabilities on the client-side. To overcome these challenges, we conclude by brainstorming some innovative ideas on some potentially interesting and useful research directions. CCS Concepts: • Security and privacy → Web application security; Domain-specific security and privacy architectures;

A Survey of the Role of Viewability Within the Online Advertising Ecosystem

“…The most similar work we found in the literature to what we propose to do here was Cai et al [27], where they presented the main stakeholders on the online advertising ecosystem, a model of their main interactions in a separate schema and a review of the main threats on security and privacy for each stakeholder. They also created a linkage chart in order to identify the relationships between attack methodologies, threats and related players.…”

“…In this work, we have performed a literature survey analyzing for the first time the role of viewability with respect to the viewpoint of each challenge and stakeholder. Similarly to [27], we modeled the online advertising ecosystem with all the stakeholders and their goals. As we have seen, the main challenges that we have identified are the definition of the campaign settings, the ad-serving process, the definition of transparent and standardized metrics, the user experience with ads, and the privacy issues.…”

“…Instead of identifying the challenges of viewability, we aim to detect all the challenges in online advertising and, later, to perform a critical survey of the viewability relationship on each one of these challenges and players. On another hand, note that Cai et al [27] identified the publisher, the advertiser, and the consumer as the main stakeholders in their model, whereas in our work we also include the ad tech companies (such as the ad networks or the ad exchanges) and the policymakers responsible of creating regulatory frameworks for advertisements, since they are highly involved in defining the online advertising directions and priorities. Finally, note that none of the aforementioned studies in this subsection have presented this online advertising ecosystem model with respect to viewability, and thus our study is completely novel within the literature.…”

A Word-Level Analytical Approach for Identifying Malicious Domain Names Caused by Dictionary-Based DGA Malware

“…Malware programs such as Conficker and Kraken, which have caused considerable worldwide damage, implement DGAs as one aspect of their capabilities. Moreover, researchers have found improper codes embedded in websites and web-based advertisements that are designed to promote the spread of such malware programs over broad target areas [15,16].…”

A Superficial Analysis Approach for Identifying Malicious Domain Names Generated by DGA Malware

“…Malware programs such as Conficker and Kraken, which have caused considerable worldwide damage, implement DGAs as one aspect of their capabilities. Moreover, researchers have found improper codes embedded in websites and web-based advertisements that are designed to promote the spread of such malware programs over broad target areas [11], [12]. Figure 1 schematically depicts callbacks implemented by DGA malware.…”