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A Measurement Study on the Advertisements Displayed to Web Users Coming from the Regular Web and from Tor

Online advertising is an effective way for businesses to find new customers and expand their reach to a great variety of audiences. Due to the large number of participants interacting in the process, advertising networks act as brokers between website owners and businesses facilitating the display of advertisements. Unfortunately, this system is abused by cybercriminals to perform illegal activities such as malvertising. In this paper, we perform a measurement of malvertising from the user point of view. Our goal is to collect advertisements from a regular Internet connection and using The Onion Router in an attempt to understand whether using different technologies to access the Web could influence the probability of infection. We compare the data from our experiments to find differences in the malvertising activity observed. We show that the level of maliciousness is similar between the two types of accesses. Nevertheless, there are significant differences related to the malicious landing pages delivered in each type of access. Our results provide the research community with insights into how ad traffic is treated depending on the way users access Web content.