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Human trafficking is among the most challenging law enforcement problems which demands persistent fight against from all over the globe. In this study, we leverage readily available data from the website "Backpage"-- used for classified…
Malicious advertisement URLs pose a security risk since they are the source of cyber-attacks, and the need to address this issue is growing in both industry and academia. Generally, the attacker delivers an attack vector to the user by…
Since most countries are coming up with online privacy regulations, such as GDPR in the EU, online publishers need to find a balance between revenue from targeted advertisement and user privacy. One way to be able to still show targeted…
Trackers have recently started to mix tracking and functional resources to circumvent privacy-enhancing content blocking tools. Such mixed web resources put content blockers in a bind: risk breaking legitimate functionality if they act and…
Browser fingerprinting is a pervasive online tracking technique used increasingly often for profiling and targeted advertising. Prior research on the prevalence of fingerprinting heavily relied on automated web crawls, which inherently…
Online advertising platforms use algorithmic systems to power the process of matching ads to users, termed ad delivery. Prior audits have demonstrated that ad delivery can be skewed by demographic attributes, such that ads are…
Online privacy has become increasingly important in recent years. While third-party cookies have been widely used for years, they have also been criticized for their potential impact on user privacy. They can be used by advertisers to track…
Stateful and stateless web tracking gathered much attention in the last decade, however they were always measured separately. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to detect and measure cookie respawning with browser and…
On the basis of the XSS (Cross Site Scripting) and Web Crawler techniques it is possible to go through the barriers of the Google Adsense advertising system by obtaining the validated links of the ads published on a website. Such method…
Modern websites frequently use and embed third-party services to facilitate web development, connect to social media, or for monetization. This often introduces privacy issues as the inclusion of third-party services on a website can allow…
We perform a large-scale analysis of third-party trackers on the World Wide Web from more than 3.5 billion web pages of the CommonCrawl 2012 corpus. We extract a dataset containing more than 140 million third-party embeddings in over 41…
Recent work in traffic analysis has shown that traffic patterns leaked through side channels can be used to recover important semantic information. For instance, attackers can find out which website, or which page on a website, a user is…
Privacy regulations have led to many websites showing cookie banners to their users. Usually, cookie banners present the user with the option to "accept" or "reject" cookies. Recently, a new form of paywall-like cookie banner has taken hold…
With the rapid proliferation of multimedia data in the internet, there has been a fast rise in the creation of videos for the viewers. This enables the viewers to skip the advertisement breaks in the videos, using ad blockers and 'skip ad'…
Online trackers personalize ads campaigns, exponentially increasing their efficacy compared to traditional channels. The downside of this is that thousands of mostly unknown systems own our profiles and violate our privacy without our…
Opaque algorithms disseminate and mediate the content that users consume on online social media platforms. This algorithmic mediation serves users with contents of their liking, on the other hand, it may cause several inadvertent risks to…
Recommender systems often rely on graph-based filters, such as normalized item-item adjacency matrices and low-pass filters. While effective, the centralized computation of these components raises concerns about privacy, security, and the…
Motivated by the growing popularity of smart TVs, we present a large-scale measurement study of smart TVs by collecting and analyzing their network traffic from two different vantage points. First, we analyze aggregate network traffic of…
The fast growing ad-blocker usage results in large revenue decrease for ad-supported online websites. Facing this problem, many online publishers choose either to cooperate with ad-blocker software companies to show acceptable ads or to…
Processing large complex networks recently attracted considerable interest. Complex graphs are useful in a wide range of applications from technological networks to biological systems like the human brain. Sometimes these networks are…