Researchers Defeat Perceptual Ad Blockers, Declare 'New Arms Race'

dmoberhaus writes: Perceptual ad blockers were supposed to be the 'superweapon' that put an end to the arms race between advertisers and users. According to new research, however, perceptual ad blockers will come out on the losing side in the war against internet advertisers and expose users to a host of new attack vectors in the process. Researchers at Stanford tricked six different visual classifiers used in perceptual ad blockers with adversarial ads designed to trick the ad blockers by making nearly imperceptible changes to the ads. 'The researchers tried several different adversarial attacks on the perceptual ad blockers' visual classifiers,' Motherboard reports. 'One attack, for example, slightly altered the AdChoices logo that is commonly used to disclose advertisements to fool the perceptual ad blocker. In another attack, the researchers demonstrated how website publishers could overlay a transparent mask over a website that would allow ads to evade perceptual ad blockers.'

'The aim of our work is not to downplay the merits of ad-blocking, nor discredit the perceptual ad blocking philosophy, which is sound when instantiated with a robust visual ad detector,' the researchers concluded. 'Rather, our overarching goal is to highlight and raise awareness on the vulnerabilities that arise in building ad blockers with current computer vision systems.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.