TY - GEN
T1 - An empirical study of click fraud in mobile advertising networks
AU - Cho, Geumhwan
AU - Cho, Junsung
AU - Song, Youngbae
AU - Kim, Hyoungshick
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 IEEE.
PY - 2015/10/16
Y1 - 2015/10/16
N2 - Smartphone advertisement is increasingly used among many applications and allows developers to obtain revenue through in-app advertising. Our study aims at identifying potential security risks of a type of mobile advertisement where advertisers are charged for their advertisements only when a user clicks (or touches) on the advertisements in their applications. In the Android platform, we design an automated click generation attack and empirically evaluate eight popular advertising networks by performing real attacks on them. Our experimental results show that six advertising networks (75%) out of eight (Millennial Media, App Lovin, Ad Fit, Mdot M, Rev Mob and Cauly Ads) are vulnerable to our attacks. We also discuss how to develop effective defense mechanisms to mitigate such automated click fraud attacks.
AB - Smartphone advertisement is increasingly used among many applications and allows developers to obtain revenue through in-app advertising. Our study aims at identifying potential security risks of a type of mobile advertisement where advertisers are charged for their advertisements only when a user clicks (or touches) on the advertisements in their applications. In the Android platform, we design an automated click generation attack and empirically evaluate eight popular advertising networks by performing real attacks on them. Our experimental results show that six advertising networks (75%) out of eight (Millennial Media, App Lovin, Ad Fit, Mdot M, Rev Mob and Cauly Ads) are vulnerable to our attacks. We also discuss how to develop effective defense mechanisms to mitigate such automated click fraud attacks.
KW - Advertising networks
KW - Android
KW - Click fraud
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84961602290
U2 - 10.1109/ARES.2015.62
DO - 10.1109/ARES.2015.62
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84961602290
T3 - Proceedings - 10th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, ARES 2015
SP - 382
EP - 388
BT - Proceedings - 10th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, ARES 2015
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 10th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, ARES 2015
Y2 - 24 August 2015 through 27 August 2015
ER -