ISPs and Ad Networks Against Botnet Ad Fraud

• Presented at: Conference on Decision and Game Theory for Security, Berlin, Germany, November 22-23, 2010
• Published in: Decision And Game Theory For Security (ISBN: 978-3-642-17196-3), vol. 6442, p. 149-167
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Springer-Verlag New York, Ms Ingrid Cunningham, 175 Fifth Ave, New York, Ny 10010 Usa, 2010

Botnets are a serious threat on the Internet and require huge resources to be thwarted. ISPs are in the best position to fight botnets and there are a number of recently proposed initiatives that focus on how ISPs should detect and remediate bots. However, it is very expensive for ISPs to do it alone and they would probably welcome some external funding. Among others, botnets severely affect ad networks (ANs), as botnets are increasingly used for ad fraud. Thus, ANs have an economic incentive, but they are not in the best position to fight botnet ad fraud. Consequently, ANs might be willing to subsidize the ISPs to do so. We provide a game-theoretic model to study the strategic behavior of ISPs and ANs and we identify the conditions under which ANs are likely to solve the problem of botnet ad fraud by themselves and those under which the AN will subsidize the ISP to achieve this goal. Our analytical and numerical results show that the optimal strategy depends on the ad revenue loss of the ANs due to ad fraud and the number of bots participating in ad fraud.

Keywords: Ad Fraud ; Botnets ; ISP ; Ad Network ; Security ; Game Theory ; NCCR-MICS ; NCCR-MICS/Secu ; MICS

Reference

• EPFL-CONF-151912
• View record in Web of Science

Record created on 2010-09-20, modified on 2017-05-12