An Extensive Study on Online and Mobile Ad Fraud

Abstract

The advertising ecosystem faces major threats from ad fraud caused by artificial display requests or clicks, created by malicious codes, bot-nets, and click-firms. Currently, there is a multibillion-dollar online advertisement market which generates the primary revenue for some of the internet's most successful websites. Unfortunately, the complexities of the advertisement ecosystem attract a considerable amount of cybercrime activity, which profits at the expense of advertisers. Web ad fraud has been extensively studied whereas fraud in mobile ads has received very little attention. Most of these studies have been carried out to identify fraudulent online and mobile ads clicks. However, the identification of individual fraudulent displays in mobile ads has yet to be explored. Additionally, other fraudulent activity aspects such as hacking ad-campaign accounts have rarely been addressed. The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art ad fraud in web content as well as mobile apps. In this context, we will introduce a deeper understanding of vulnerabilities of online/mobile advertising ecosystems, the ad fraud’s well-known attacks, their effective detection methods and prevention mechanisms.