Fighting online click-fraud using bluff ads
- 9 April 2010
- journal article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
- Vol. 40 (2), 21-25
- https://doi.org/10.1145/1764873.1764877
Abstract
Online advertising is currently the richest source of revenue for many Internet giants. The increased number of online businesses, specialized websites and modern profiling techniques have all contributed to an explosion of the income of ad brokers from online advertising. The single biggest threat to this growth, is however, click-fraud. Trained botnets and individuals are hired by click-fraud specialists in order to maximize the revenue of certain users from the ads they publish on their websites, or to launch an attack between competing businesses. In this note we wish to raise the awareness of the networking research community on potential research areas within the online advertising field. As an example strategy, we present Bluff ads; a class of ads that join forces in order to increase the effort level for click-fraud spammers. Bluff ads are either targeted ads, with irrelevant display text, or highly relevant display text, with irrelevant targeting information. They act as a litmus test for the legitimacy of the individual clicking on the ads. Together with standard threshold-based methods, fake ads help to decrease click-fraud levels.Keywords
This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit:
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- On the security of pay-per-click and other Web advertising schemesComputer Networks, 1999