Paper Info
Title
Ad Injection at Scale: Assessing Deceptive Advertisement Modifications
Abstract
Today, web injection manifests in many forms, but fundamentally occurs when malicious and unwanted actors tamper directly with browser sessions for their own profit. In this work we illuminate the scope and negative impact of one of these forms, ad injection, in which users have ads imposed on them in addition to, or different from, those that websites originally sent them. We develop a multi-staged pipeline that identifies ad injection in the wild and captures its distribution and revenue chains. We find that ad injection has entrenched itself as a cross-browser monetization platform impacting more than 5% of unique daily IP addresses accessing Google -- tens of millions of users around the globe. Injected ads arrive on a client's machine through multiple vectors: our measurements identify 50,870 Chrome extensions and 34,407 Windows binaries, 38% and 17% of which are explicitly malicious. A small number of software developers support the vast majority of these injectors who in turn syndicate from the larger ad ecosystem. We have contacted the Chrome Web Store and the advertisers targeted by ad injectors to alert each of the deceptive practices involved.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/SP.2015.17
2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Keywords
Field
DocType
web injection,ad injection,ad fraud
Revenue,Internet privacy,Internet security,Advertising,Computer security,Computer science,Monetization,Software,Profitability index,Syndicate,The Internet
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1081-6011
22
0.85
References 
Authors
21
12
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kurt Thomas1118956.78
Elie Bursztein278747.53
Chris Grier3220.85
Grant Ho4976.24
Nav Jagpal5220.85
Alexandros Kapravelos632420.58
damon mccoy72073125.49
Antonio Nappa825411.01
Vern Paxson9140312130.20
Paul Pearce10585.31
Niels Provos111393117.49
Moheeb Abu Rajab1289068.08