Protecting Internet users from becoming victimized attackers of click‐fraud
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Internet users are often victimized by malicious attackers. Some attackers infect and use innocent users' machines to launch large‐scale attacks without the users' knowledge. One of such attacks is the click‐fraud attack. Click‐fraud happens in pay‐per‐click ad networks where the ad network charges advertisers for every click on their ads. Click‐fraud has been proved to be a serious problem for the online advertisement industry. In a click‐fraud attack, a user or an automated software clicks on an ad with a malicious intent and advertisers need to pay for those valueless clicks. Among many forms of click‐fraud, botnets with the automated clickers are the most severe ones. In this study, we present a method for detecting automated clickers from the user side. The proposed method to fight click‐fraud, FCFraud, can be integrated into the desktop and smart device operating systems. Since most modern operating systems already provide some kind of antimalware service, our proposed method can be implemented as a part of the service. We believe that an effective protection at the operating system level can save billions of dollars of the advertisers. Experiments show that FCFraud is 99.6% (98.2% in mobile ad library–generated traffic) accurate in classifying ad requests from all user processes and it is 100% successful in detecting clickbots in both desktop and mobile devices. We implement a cloud backend for the FCFraud service to save battery power in mobile devices. The overhead of executing FCFraud is also analyzed and we show that it is reasonable for both the platforms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".