SpartanShield: A Layered Defense against Malvertising

Online advertising is a cornerstone of the internet in today's digital age. Malicious Advertising, colloquially known as malvertising, uses advertisements as an attack vector to spread malicious software to unsuspecting victims. As a solution, this research aims to provide a low cost and easy to use layered defense against malvertising using a web browsing configuration of the ad blocking Browser Brave, ad blocking extension uBlock Origin, and the Pi-Hole DNS sinkhole. This configuration, aptly dubbed SpartanShield, provides significant performance gains and ad blocking over the base browsers used for comparison which are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera.