TY - GEN
T1 - The Dark Alleys of Madison Avenue: Understanding Malicious Advertisements
AU - Zarras, Apostolis
AU - Kapravelos, Alexandros
AU - Stringhini, Gianluca
AU - Holz, Thorsten
AU - Kruegel, Christopher
AU - Vigna, Giovanni
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
U2 - 10.1145/2663716.2663719
DO - 10.1145/2663716.2663719
M3 - Conference article in proceeding
BT - Proceedings of the 14th ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC)
ER -