People everywhere are generating ever-increasing amounts of data, often without being fully aware of who is recording what about them. For example, initiatives such as mandated smart metering, expected to be widely deployed in the UK in the next few years and already attempted in countries such as the Netherlands, will generate vast quantities of detailed, personal data about huge segments of the population. Neither the impact nor the potential of this society-wide data gathering are well understood.
On numerous occasions, trips to the facilities coincide with an important mobile phone call. Due to the sleek and polished nature of modern phones, attempting to promptly deal with such calls can occasionally lead to the phone sliding through the owner’s hands, surrendering to the force of gravity and flying down the hole. This is a disaster, and often an expensive incident. It can also be a health and safety hazard, with the owner desperately attempting to retrieve their phone and re-using it.
Online advertising is currently the richest source of revenue for many Internet giants. The increased number of online businesses, specialized websites and modern profiling techniques have all contributed to an explosion of the income of ad brokers from online advertising. The single biggest threat to this growth, is however, click-fraud. Trained botnets and individuals are hired by click-fraud specialists in order to maximize the revenue of certain users from the ads they publish on their websites, or to launch an attack between competing businesses.
On-line advertisement has become one of the most important funding models to support Internet sites. Given that large sums of money are involved in on-line advertisement, malicious parties are unfortunately attempting to gain an unfair advantage. Click-fraud attacks are one instance of such malicious behavior, where software imitates a human clicking on an advertisement link.
The goal of the paper is to raise awareness on potential research areas related to click-fraud attacks. The paper presents Bluff ads, a strategy to increase the effort of click-fraud spammers. Bluff ads areeither targeted ads, with irrelevant display text, or highly relevant display text, with irrelevant targeting information. The goal of Bluff adds is to work as a “Captcha” for the user legitimacy. If a large number of them is clicked, the user is deemed to be flagged as suspicious. A very early evaluation consisting of a simple experiment is presented in the paper. The experiment suggests that benign usersdo not click on Bluff adds.
Because of the importance of on-line advertising, click-fraud is an interesting and important area of research. The problem area is timely and needs further investigation. The proposed strategy is interesting, and also warrants further investigation.
We hope that this intriguing paper will excite readers and spur additional interest in this important area.
Despite the large number of papers on network topology modeling and inference, there still exists ambiguity about the real nature of the Internet AS and router level topology. While recent findings have illustrated the inaccuracies in maps inferred from BGP peering and traceroute measurements, existing topology models still produce static topologies, using simplistic assumptions about power law observations and preferential attachment.