2010/02/11 by Hamed Haddadi, Haddadi, Hamed
Computer Science · #Advanced Malware Detection Techniques #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting #J.4 #Spam and Phishing Detection #cs.CR
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1002.2353
Draft
arxiv created 2010/02/11 · openalex publication_date 2010/02/11 · arxiv updated 2010/02/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Online advertising is currently the greatest source of revenue for many Internet giants. The increased number of 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 even 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 this emerging 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.