Paper Info
Title
ViceROI: catching click-spam in search ad networks
Abstract
Click-spam in online advertising, where unethical publishers use malware or trick users into clicking ads, siphons off hundreds of millions of advertiser dollars meant to support free websites and apps. Ad networks today, sadly, rely primarily on security through obscurity to defend against click-spam. In this paper, we present Viceroi, a principled approach to catching click-spam in search ad networks. It is designed based on the intuition that click-spam is a profit-making business that needs to deliver higher return on investment (ROI) for click-spammers than other (ethical) business models to offset the risk of getting caught. Viceroi operates at the ad network where it has visibility into all ad clicks. Working with a large real-world ad network, we find that the simple-yet-general Viceroi approach catches over six very different classes of click-spam attacks (e.g., malware-driven, search-hijacking, arbitrage) without any tuning knobs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2508859.2516688
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Keywords
Field
DocType
simple-yet-general viceroi approach catch,search ad network,clicking ad,principled approach,business model,ad network,click-spam attack,large real-world ad network,ad click,profit-making business,click fraud
Internet privacy,Visibility,Security through obscurity,Return on investment,Computer science,Computer security,Online advertising,Click fraud,Business model,Arbitrage,Malware
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
21
0.86
17
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vacha Dave126610.12
Saikat Guha21546116.91
Yin Zhang33492281.04