If It Looks Like a Spammer and Behaves Like a Spammer, It Must Be a Spammer
Name
10207_2016_321_ReferencePDF.pdf
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Author(s)
Shmueli, Erez
Nouh, Mariam
Alabdulkareem, Ahmad
Alsaleh, Mansour
Alarifi, Abdulrahman
Alfaris, Anas Faris
Pentland, Alex Paul
Almaatouq, Abdullah
Singh, Vivek Kumar
Date Issued
October 2016
Journal
International Journal of Information Security
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Citation
Almaatouq, Abdullah et al. “If It Looks like a Spammer and Behaves like a Spammer, It Must Be a Spammer: Analysis and Detection of Microblogging Spam Accounts.” International Journal of Information Security 15.5 (2016): 475–491.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Spam in online social networks (OSNs) is a systemic problem that imposes a threat to these services in terms of undermining their value to advertisers and potential investors, as well as negatively affecting users’ engagement. As spammers continuously keep creating newer accounts and evasive techniques upon being caught, a deeper understanding of their spamming strategies is vital to the design of future social media defense mechanisms. In this work, we present a unique analysis of spam accounts in OSNs viewed through the lens of their behavioral characteristics. Our analysis includes over 100 million messages collected from Twitter over the course of 1 month. We show that there exist two behaviorally distinct categories of spammers and that they employ different spamming strategies. Then, we illustrate how users in these two categories demonstrate different individual properties as well as social interaction patterns. Finally, we analyze the detectability of spam accounts with respect to three categories of features, namely content attributes, social interactions, and profile properties.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sociotechnical Systems Research Center
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-016-0321-5
