Digital "Monkey" tracks illegal advertisements inside apps

A new tool exposes the fraudulent advertising that moves the user to click accidentally.
The announcements in mobile applications generate over 8,000 million annually (about 5,760 million). With so much money at stake, there have been several ways to cheat the system. One is to write malicious code to generate false clicks. A smarter approach is to make users click on ads more easily through the "fraud on the placement." Developers can make ads are too small to stand too close to a button of a game or even invisible.

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Now, researchers from Microsoft and the University of Southern California (USA) has occurred to them what they claim is the first technology to detect and counter fraud in large-scale placement has been made public. They have built something they have dubbed "digital monkey" to jump between screens million applications and check designs violate the terms of use of the corresponding application store.
When tested with 50,000 applications for Windows Phone, discovered more than 1,000 ads that included the terms of use skipped; 1,200 applications for Windows 8 tablet, discovered more than 50 problems. The work, which was done in April 2013 is the subject of a paper to be presented this week at the conference Usenix in Seattle (USA).

With millions of applications for sale, it is unfeasible to take charge of human visual inspection. So much of the research has focused on the problem of click fraud, in which automated programs called robots dedicated to click on ads.

Microsoft's new tool systematically reviews the apps from an app store, running on the emulator and then interacts with them and tries to revise everything you can. If the monkey is pressed a button. If there is a search box, trying to establish what could be a text search and enter a zip code for example. "The sole purpose of the monkey is going to all possible pages within the application, explains Jie Liu, principal researcher at Microsoft.

One of those found by the more convoluted monkey tricks Microsoft was within an application to play mah-jongg, Chinese tile game. A vertical ads on the right corner was full of chips that looked like used in the game. "You'll think it's an application without ads," says Liu.

Other application developers advertisements shrink to fit the game design, not realizing or ignoring the fact that the terms of use of the app store do not allow ads smaller than a certain size.
The IT University North Carolina State Xuxian Jiang, mobile security expert says that the work is new. Although the system can not detect if the misplacement is intentional or not, "is a good start," he says.