# Measuring Abuse in Web Push Advertising

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.06448 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06448/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Feb 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [HARPO: Learning to Subvert Online Behavioral Advertising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05792/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid growth of online advertising has fueled the growth of ad-blocking software, such as new ad-blocking and privacy-oriented browsers or browser extensions. In response, both ad publishers and ad networks are constantly trying to pursue new strategies to keep up their revenues. To this end, ad networks have started to leverage the Web Push technology enabled by modern web browsers. As web push notifications (WPNs) are relatively new, their role in ad delivery has not been yet studied in depth. Furthermore, it is unclear to what extent WPN ads are being abused for malvertising (i.e., to deliver malicious ads). In this paper, we aim to fill this gap. Specifically, we propose a system called PushAdMiner that is dedicated to (1) automatically registering for and collecting a large number of web-based push notifications from publisher websites, (2) finding WPN-based ads among these notifications, and (3) discovering malicious WPN-based ad campaigns. Using PushAdMiner, we collected and analyzed 21,541 WPN messages by visiting thousands of different websites. Among these, our system identified 572 WPN ad campaigns, for a total of 5,143 WPN-based ads that were pushed by a variety of ad networks. Furthermore, we found that 51% of all WPN ads we collected are malicious, and that traditional ad-blockers and malicious URL filters are remarkably ineffective against WPN-based malicious ads, leaving a significant abuse vector unchecked.