Papers
Topics
Authors
Recent
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Gemini 2.5 Flash
156 tokens/sec
GPT-4o
7 tokens/sec
Gemini 2.5 Pro Pro
45 tokens/sec
o3 Pro
4 tokens/sec
GPT-4.1 Pro
38 tokens/sec
DeepSeek R1 via Azure Pro
28 tokens/sec
2000 character limit reached

Measuring Abuse in Web Push Advertising (2002.06448v1)

Published 15 Feb 2020 in cs.CR

Abstract: The rapid growth of online advertising has fueled the growth of ad-blocking software, such as new ad-blocking and privacy-oriented browsers or browser extensions. In response, both ad publishers and ad networks are constantly trying to pursue new strategies to keep up their revenues. To this end, ad networks have started to leverage the Web Push technology enabled by modern web browsers. As web push notifications (WPNs) are relatively new, their role in ad delivery has not been yet studied in depth. Furthermore, it is unclear to what extent WPN ads are being abused for malvertising (i.e., to deliver malicious ads). In this paper, we aim to fill this gap. Specifically, we propose a system called PushAdMiner that is dedicated to (1) automatically registering for and collecting a large number of web-based push notifications from publisher websites, (2) finding WPN-based ads among these notifications, and (3) discovering malicious WPN-based ad campaigns. Using PushAdMiner, we collected and analyzed 21,541 WPN messages by visiting thousands of different websites. Among these, our system identified 572 WPN ad campaigns, for a total of 5,143 WPN-based ads that were pushed by a variety of ad networks. Furthermore, we found that 51% of all WPN ads we collected are malicious, and that traditional ad-blockers and malicious URL filters are remarkably ineffective against WPN-based malicious ads, leaving a significant abuse vector unchecked.

Citations (2)

Summary

We haven't generated a summary for this paper yet.