Google AdSense vulnerability revealed
A new paper from Complutense University called “A vulnerability in Google AdSense: Automatic extraction of links to ads” highlights a weakness in the system which makes click fraud possible.
The paper shows how an attacker can circumvent the security barriers of Google Adsense and create a system to automate ad clicking.
“On the basis of the XSS (Cross Site Scripting) and Web Crawler techniques, it is possible to go through the barriers of the Google Adsense advertising system by obtaining the validated links of the ads published on a website,” the paper states.
“Such method involves obtaining the source code built for the Google Java applet for publishing and handling ads and for the final link retrieval.”
“Once the links of the ads have been obtained, you can use the user sessions visiting other websites to load such links, in the background, by a simple re-direction, through a hidden iframe, so that the IP addresses clicking are different in each case.”
The full paper and code used in the research is available here: A vulnerability in Google AdSense: Automatic extraction of links to ads
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