Detectives: detecting coalition hit inflation attacks in advertising networks streams

Click fraud is jeopardizing the industry of Internet advertising. Internet advertising is crucial for the thriving of the entire Internet, since it allows producers to advertise their products, and hence contributes to the well being of ecommerce. Moreover, advertising supports the intellectual value of the Internet by covering the running expenses of publishing content. Some content publishers are dishonest, and use automation to generate traffic to defraud the advertisers. Similarly, some advertisers automate clicks on the advertisements of their competitors to deplete their competitors' advertising budgets. This paper describes the advertising network model, and focuses on the most sophisticated type of fraud, which involves coalitions among fraudsters. We build on several published theoretical results to devise the Similarity-Seeker algorithm that discovers coalitions made by pairs of fraudsters. We then generalize the solution to coalitions of arbitrary sizes. Before deployi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Ahmed Metwally, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi
• Keywords: Advertisers Automate Clicks, Advertising Network Model, Internet Advertising, Internet Technology, WWW 2007