Mitigating Information Manipulation

Dedicated to my lord Without you, I cannot reach this stage. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Wenke Lee, and my co-advisor Nick Feam-ster, for their understandings, support, and encouragement throughout my graduate studies in the program of information security. I have been amazingly fortunate to have them as my advisors. Without their constructive criticism, rapport and limitless capacity for knowledge, such an accomplishment would have been impossible for me to achieve. I am also deeply grateful to Dr. Roberto Perdisci for his insights and more importantly , the opportunities to work with him, from which I learned tremendously. His encouragements and belief in students warmed my heart even when I was disheartened. To my colleagues and friends, Anmol Sheth and Udi Weinsberg, thank you all for your support, kindness and comforting throughout the ups and downs of my graduate studies. To my family back in China, I thank you for your unconditional love and support. To my dear wife, Sui Huang, I could not thank you enough for your support, patience and encouragements. 4 33 Chrome extensions that Google took down due to ad injection bundle. 78 5 The HTTP request patterns originated from adware for each ad network. The table shows the purpose of the request (fetch an ad or report that a user clicked on an ad), the field used to identify the affiliate (adware), and the method used by the ad network to track the 6 Statistics regarding the four domains used by adware for ad injections, showing the percentage of unique IPs (out of the 20 million IPs in the DNS dataset) that resolve each domain, the total ad requests and the average daily ad requests per user from each domain in the HTTP 1 The target of information manipulators: 1 the input data to the information service, and 2 the output from the information service.. . 2 2 Websites with personalized services (personalized services tailor the data in the red rectangles). 4 The promotion rate for each of the 25 target videos in channel lady16makeup.