Paper Info
Title
The Dark Alleys of Madison Avenue: Understanding Malicious Advertisements
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2663716.2663719
Internet Measurement Conference
Keywords
Field
DocType
malvertising,online advertising,general,on-line information services,electronic commerce,malware
Interstitial webpage,Internet privacy,Contextual advertising,Advertising,Web page,Computer science,Popularity,Computer network,Online advertising,Malware
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
30
1.30
25
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Apostolis Zarras116212.33
Alexandros Kapravelos232420.58
Gianluca Stringhini370161.87
T HORSTEN HOLZ43532232.93
Christopher Kruegel58799516.05
Giovanni Vigna67121507.72