Badvertisements: Stealthy Click-Fraud with Oblivious Accomplices
Jacob Ratkiewicz
Indiana University, Bloomington
Wednesday, October 18, 11:00am
Lieb, Room 319
Stevens Institute of Technology
Abstract
We describe a new type of threat to the Internet infrastructure, in
the shape of a highly efficient but very well camouflaged click-fraud
attack on the advertising infrastructure. The attack, which we refer
to as a "badvertisement", is described and experimentally verified on
several prominent advertisement schemes. This stealthy attack can be
thought of as a threatening mutation of spam and phishing attacks,
with which it has many commonalities, except for the fact that it is
not the targeted individual who is the victim in the attack, but the
unwitting advertiser.