Badvertisements: Stealthy Click Fraud with Unwitting...

Google Tech Talks September 19, 2006 Dr. Markus Jakobsson, Associate Professor of Informatics at IUB Associate Director of CACR 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, not using any type of malware. 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...