Transcript Click Fraud Forensics - Seidenberg School of Computer

Click Fraud
Forensics
Dean Qudah
Pace University
DPS 2010
What Is Click Fraud?
 Click fraud, the intentional clicking on PPC
advertisements, where the perpetrator has no intention of
buying the products or services advertised
Elements of PPC Advertising
Advertiser
• Provide
advertisement
• And Budget
• Contract with
commissioner.
Commissioner
• A broker
between
Advertisers &
Publishers
• The backstage
for targeting
and budgeting
Publisher
• Publish Ads on
their websites
and earn
money for
clicks
• The place
where most of
the fraudulent
occur.
Click Fraud Categories
 Clicking on competitors occurs when a company
purposely clicks on a competitor so as to cost
them money, use up their daily budgets, and force
them off the auction.
 Network fraud occurs when Website owners click
on their own banner advertisements in order to
generate revenue from the search engine who is
serving the banner advertisement.
How Big Is It?
 Click Forensics, a US firm that audits Internet traffic,
reported that 17.1 percent of clicks on online advertising
were frauds evidently intended solely to drive up bills for
businesses paying "per click.”
 Networks of hacked computers referred to as "botnets"
are said to be responsible for nearly a third of the click
fraud in final three months of 2008.
Can We trust Search Engines?
 Google has trivialized click fraud and mischaracterized it
as a minor problem.
 After Many Law suits and hundreds of reports from
different agencies, Google Admitted the problem and start
cooperating.
 After all Click Fraud means more profit for search engines.
Click Fraud Detection
There are many ways to detect and minimize click fraud;
• Monitoring the Click Through Rate ( CTR), and make sure it
is within the norms.
• The Data Analysis Approach. Since privacy is a major
obstacle in detecting fraud, we have no choice but to use
data analysis approach by analyzing the temporary
surfers’ Identification data such as IP address and Cookies.
Example of Statistical Methods
 Statistical data analysis can be done by storing the entire
traffic data in a database and periodically executing
aggregate SQL queries to identify outliers that would be
candidate for fraudulent behavior.
 This method has a challenging scale problem here. Since
an average-sized commissioner receives around 70M
records per hour, storing the traffic and running the query
could be very expensive.
Mission un accomplished
 So far there is no good solution for this problem.
 Fraudsters become more and more advanced and use
automated tools and software.
 Many research papers and PhD dissertation tried to come
up with solutions.