acm sigcomm

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.