Related papers: Measuring Abuse in Web Push Advertising
Misconfigurations and outdated software are a major cause of compromised websites and data leaks. Past research has proposed and evaluated sending automated security notifications to the operators of misconfigured websites, but encountered…
The online advertising market has recently reached the 500 billion dollar mark. To accommodate the need to match a user with the highest bidder at a fraction of a second, it has moved towards a complex, automated and often opaque model that…
Ad and tracking blocking extensions are popular tools for improving web performance, privacy and aesthetics. Content blocking extensions typically rely on filter lists to decide whether a web request is associated with tracking or…
Cybercriminals have leveraged the popularity of a large user base available on Online Social Networks to spread spam campaigns by propagating phishing URLs, attaching malicious contents, etc. However, another kind of spam attacks using…
This paper introduces adF, a novel system for analyzing the vulnerability of different devices, Operating Systems (OSes), and browsers to web fingerprinting. adF performs its measurements from code inserted in ads. We have used our system…
Unsolicited email (spam) is still a problem for users of the email service. Even though current email anti-spam solutions filter most spam emails, some spam emails still are delivered to the inbox of users. A special class of spam emails…
To protect users' privacy, legislators have regulated the usage of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users' consent before collecting data. Consequently, websites started showing more and more consent management modules --…
Online advertising relies on a complex and opaque supply chain that involves multiple stakeholders, including advertisers, publishers, and ad-networks, each with distinct and sometimes conflicting incentives. Recent research has…
Millions of web users directly depend on ad and tracker blocking tools to protect their privacy. However, existing ad and tracker blockers fall short because of their reliance on trivially susceptible advertising and tracking content. In…
Mobile network operators implement firewalls to stop illicit messages, but scammers find ways to evade detection. Previous work has looked into SMS texts that are blocked by these firewalls. However, there is little insight into SMS texts…
Security is an increasing concern in software development. Developer Question and Answer (Q&A) websites provide a large amount of security discussion. Existing studies have used human-defined rules to mine security discussions, but these…
The growing commoditization of the underground economy has given rise to malware delivery networks, which charge fees for quickly delivering malware or unwanted software to a large number of hosts. To provide this service, a key method is…
A reader browsing through an online article is highly likely to encounter an advertorial, often without realizing it. Advertorials represent a relatively new marketing strategy where advertisements are deliberately designed to resemble the…
Numerous surveys have shown that Web users are concerned about the loss of privacy associated with online tracking. Alarmingly, these surveys also reveal that people are also unaware of the amount of data sharing that occurs between ad…
The increased use of online social networks for the dissemination of information comes with the misuse of the internet for cyberbullying, cybercrime, spam, vandalism, amongst other things. To proactively identify abuse in the networks, we…
Although the use of pay-per-click mechanisms stimulates the prosperity of the mobile advertisement network, fraudulent ad clicks result in huge financial losses for advertisers. Extensive studies identify click fraud according to…
Phishing websites are everywhere, and countermeasures based on static blocklists cannot cope with such a threat. To address this problem, state-of-the-art solutions entail the application of machine learning (ML) to detect phishing websites…
Ad blockers allow users to browse websites without viewing ads. Online news providers that rely on advertising revenue tend to perceive users adoption of ad blockers purely as a threat to revenue. Yet, this perception ignores the…
Mobile advertising dominates app monetization but introduces risks ranging from intrusive user experience to malware delivery. Existing detection methods rely either on static analysis, which misses runtime behaviors, or on heuristic UI…
The NPM ecosystem has become a primary target for software supply chain attacks, yet existing detection tools are evaluated in isolation on incompatible datasets, making cross-tool comparison unreliable. We conduct a benchmark-driven…