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.
more here...........http://www.ei.rub.de/media/emma/veroeffentlichungen/2014/09/02/paper.pdf
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.
more here...........http://www.ei.rub.de/media/emma/veroeffentlichungen/2014/09/02/paper.pdf