Click Fraud Detection Approaches to analyze the Ad Clicks Performed by Malicious Code

Abstract

Mobile PR is an important component of the mobile app ecosystem. A major threat to this ecosystem’s long-term health is click fraud, which involves clicking on ads while infected with malware or using an automated bot to do it for you. The methods used to identify click fraud now focus on looking at server requests. Although these methods have the potential to produce huge numbers of false negatives, they may easily be avoided if clicks are hidden behind proxies or distributed globally. AdSherlock is a customer-side (inside the app) efficient and deployable click fraud detection system for mobile applications that we provide in this work. AdSherlock separates the computationally expensive click request identification procedures into an offline and online approach. AdSherlock uses URL (Uniform Resource Locator) tokenization in the Offline phase to create accurate and probabilistic patterns. These models are used to identify click requests online, and an ad request tree model is used to detect click fraud after that. In order to develop and evaluate the AdSherlock prototype, we utilise actual applications. It injects the online detector directly into an executable software package using binary instrumentation technology (BIT). The findings show that AdSherlock outperforms current state-of-the-art methods for detecting click fraud with little false positives. Advertisement requests identification, mobile advertising fraud detection are some of the keywords used in this article.