CIC-AB: Online ad blocker for browsers

Abstract

Online advertisements (ads) have taken over the web, nowedays most websites contain some sort of ads. While ads produce revenue for the server maintainer or to businesses, they have become intrusive and dangerous as ever. The ads use more bandwidth, show inappropriate content, and spread malware such as adware and ransomware. Although there are many products to block ads, also known as ad blockers, most depend on static filter lists that must be managed manually and frequently updated. When malicious advertisers can produce millions of new URLs within minutes, this is not the most effective method against ads. In this paper we propose our own ad blocker, CIC-AB, which uses machine learning techniques to detect new and unknown ads without needing to update a filter list. The proposed ad blocker has been developed as an extension for the common browsers (e.g. Firefox and Chrome). It classifies URLs, both HTTP and HTTPS, as: non-ad, normal-ad and malicious-ad. The analysis showed the average precision, recall and False Positive rate of CIC-AB for five classifiers namely; Naive Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN), Random Forest (RF) and Decision Tree (DT) is 97.16%, 94.96% and 3.38% respectively.