Intrusion Detection: Winter 2011 (COMP 5900X)

Android advertisement services

Google Adwords

AdSense: - Advertising program that's used by publishers - Contexual Advertising (to surrouding context)

AdWords: - an ad brokerage system - a pay-per-click advertizing program used by Advertisers - Advertisers create short, text based ads that are very closely relatated to chosen keywords and then allow those ads to be shown on other people's web sites that feature the chosen keyword.

Instead of the traditional model of displaying ads on manually chosen sites, AdWords displays the ads according to the content of the hosting web page (“travel,” “new york giants,” “perfume”), and advertisers pay the host each time a user clicks on an ad. Google makes money from the system both by hosting ads on its own search and other sites and by collecting a commission for all ads hosted on other sites.

AdWords consists of 3 main parts: the ranking part that drives its search and ad lists, the terming part that drives its association of ads with content, and the valuing part that drives its valuation of ads.

AdWords technically refers to only one of several sub-systems (the one that attaches the smartertravel.com ad to the word “smart travel”) that constitute the larger AdWords system, along with Google's search and AdWords ad ranking systems and the AdWords pay-per-click / ad auction payment system.

Publishers get paid by:

- Unique visits
- Click-through-rate
- Avergage cost-per-click

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A code snippet provided by Google and embedded in the publishers page grabs the Ads off Google's Ad server. A third party Ad server can be used through AdSense.[http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=94145 ]

"How will Google prevent malware from third-party ads?

Google is actively working with trusted advertisers and partners to reduce the risk of malware. We specifically forbid fourth-party calls or sub-syndication to advertisers or vendors we haven't certified.

Also, all third-party ads are checked for malware when they're initially entered into our system. Google also employs an automated malware checker that continuously scans all third-party creatives running through the network. Any ad with malware will be automatically pulled from the network to protect our partner websites and their users."

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Maleware exploits (Google recommended) [1]

Google online security blog [2]

The Ghost In The Browser, Analysis of web-based Malware.[3]

BotHunter: Detecting Malware Infection Through IDS-Driven Dialog Correlation.[4]

Effective and Efficient Malware Detection at the End Host.[5]

Malware Characterization through Alert Pattern Discovery.[6]

A View on Current Malware Behaviors.[7]

Automatic Generation of Remediation Procedures for Malware Infections.[8]

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Very good paper with a wealth of technical infromation on how AdWords works: Google AdWords as a Network of Grey Surveillance [9]

Google Display Network [10]

AdSense for mobile content [11]

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Admob

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"AdMob is a mobile advertising company founded by Omar Hamoui. It was incorporated in 2006 and is based in San Mateo, California. In November 2009 it was acquired by Google for $750 million. The acquisition was completed on May 27, 2010. Apple Inc. had also expressed interest in purchasing the company the same year, but they were out-bid by Google, and have since introduced their own iAd advertising platform.[6] Prior to being acquired by Google, AdMob acquired the company AdWhirl, formerly Adrollo, which is a platform for developing advertisements in iPhone applications. AdMob offers advertising solutions for many mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, webOS, Flash Lite, and all standard mobile web browsers.

AdMob is one of the world's largest mobile advertising platforms and claims to serve more than 40 billion mobile banner and text ads per month across mobile Web sites and handset applications" - [12]

How to publish an ad for mobile application developers

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- Create an account on AdMob.
- Choose your platform from the list of supported platforms, we will select Android. A screen shot from Admob.com of the list of supported platforms:
             
- After going through some settings screens , you will be given a publisher ID (for example: a14234a2430bff2).
- Make sure that Test mode is enabled. This allows testing ads in a test environment.
- You will be asked to download a publisher's code, this is a jar file to include in your eclipse project for the Android app.
- The Android SDK documentation can be found here: [13]
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Wikipage for Admob developers[14]

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inMobi

InMobi [15] claims to be the worlds largest independent ad network, providing solutions for advertisers, producers.

They target the major platforms, including Android and iPhone

Generally speaking, their ads can take a diverse set forms:

     Full screen
     Expandable
     Scrolling 
     Touch to enlarge
     Rotating
     Video

     Banners
     Text characters

     Click to landing page
     Click to download
     Click to play video
     Click to call
     Click to lead 
     Click to text

Ad Publishers– InMobi supplies PHP-CURL, JSP, .NET, RUBY, PERL and ASP code snippets for acquiring ads. Pasting the basic code into a site creates a space for a single ad. In addition, an advanced code library is available for running multiple ads on a page, and/or for specifying parameters such as demographics, language and location.

Ad Publishers – InMobi provides filtering mechanisms to facilitate the filtering of ad types and/or sources.

Application developers – InMobi supplies SDKs for Android and iPhone applications developers.

Further investigation is require in order to understand the specifics of ad development and their integration into web pages and mobile applications. Only superficial details are provided on the InMobi page.

iOS advertisement services

iAds

This is what I could find so far, please feel free to correct any mistakes - Ben

iAd [16] is an Apple created web advertisement framework integrated to iOS starting with iOS 4. To embed iAds into an iPhone/iPad app, the programmer can use the Xcode IDE [17] to add "Ad Banners" into their apps. Some tutorials of adding banners can be found in the following links:

http://bees4honey.com/blog/tutorial/how-to-add-iad-banner-in-iphoneipad-app/

http://www.raywenderlich.com/1371/how-to-integrate-iad-into-your-iphone-app

iAds are created using web technologies, such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, using a tool called iAdProducer [18]. To have advertisements served, the ad creator must join the iAd Network [19], and submit their ad(s) for review. [20] The distribution and selection of ads is done by the Apple iAd network, and does not currently support "house ads" (ads where ad author = app developer), but will allow the app developer to "exclude ads from competitors or other unwanted advertisers based on specific keywords, URLs, and application Apple IDs" [21]

Google Adwords

Google AdWords on the iPhone/iPod/iPad is the same service as found on PCs save for minor customizations. These customziations include targetting ads for the platform [22] in addition to key words, and ensuring results fit on the display [23] of the mobile device.

The rearranging of the ad can be attributed to at least the user-agent (UA) in a web request. This can be tested with changing the user-agent in the browser of a PC and performing searches on Google. Instructions on changing the UA for Mozilla Firefox can be found at: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2004/04/24/changinguseragent.html and iPhone UAs can be found at: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/iphone-user-agent/

See the AdWords description in the Android section above for a more detailed description.

inMobi