The online advertising market has recently reached the 500 billion dollar mark, and to accommodate the need to match a user with the highest bidder at a fraction of a second, it has moved towards a complex automated model involving numerous agents and middle men. Stimulated by potential revenue and the lack of transparency, bad actors have found ways to abuse it, circumvent restrictions, and generate substantial revenue from objectionable and even illegal content. To make matters worse, they often receive advertisements from respectable companies which have nothing to do with these illegal activities. Altogether, advertiser money is funneled towards unknown entities, supporting their objectionable operations and maintaining their existence. In this project, we work towards understanding the extent of the problem and shed light on how shady agents take advantage of gaps in the ad ecosystem to monetize their operations. We study over 7 million websites and examine how state-of-the-art standards associated with online advertising are applied. We discover and present actual practices observed in the wild and show that publishers are able to monetize objectionable and illegal content and generate thousands of dollars of revenue on a monthly basis.

翻译：在线广告市场近期已达到5000亿美元的规模。为了满足在毫秒级时间内将用户与最高出价者匹配的需求，该市场已转向涉及众多代理和中间商的复杂自动化模式。受潜在收入及缺乏透明度的刺激，恶意行为者找到滥用、规避限制的方法，从令人反感甚至非法内容中获取巨额收入。更糟的是，这些内容往往展示着来自正规企业的广告，而这些企业与非法活动毫无关联。总之，广告主的资金流向未知实体，助长了其不正当运营并维持其生存。在本项目中，我们致力于理解问题的严重程度，并揭示恶意代理如何利用广告生态中的漏洞将其运营变现。我们研究了超过700万个网站，检验了与在线广告相关的最新标准应用情况。我们发现了实际环境中存在的真实操作案例，并表明发布商能够通过令人反感及非法内容实现盈利，每月产生数千美元的收入。