Measuring and fingerprinting click-spam in ad networks

Advertising plays a vital role in supporting free websites and smartphone apps. Click-spam, i.e., fraudulent or invalid clicks on online ads where the user has no actual interest in the advertiser’s site, results in advertising revenue being misappropriated by clickspammers. While ad networks take active measures to block clickspam today, the effectiveness of these measures is largely unknown. Moreover, advertisers and third parties have no way of independently estimating or defending against click-spam. In this paper, we take the first systematic look at click-spam. We propose the first methodology for advertisers to independently measure click-spam rates on their ads. We also develop an automated methodology for ad networks to proactively detect different simultaneous click-spam attacks. We validate both methodologies using data from major ad networks. We then conduct a large-scale measurement study of click-spam across ten major ad networks and four types of ads. In the process...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Vacha Dave, Saikat Guha, Yin Zhang
• Keywords: Communications, Computing And Information Systems, Information Systems Security, Scale Measurement, SIGCOMM 2012