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Over the last few years, social networking sites have become one of the main ways for users to keep track and communicate with their friends online. Sites such as Facebook,MySpace, and Twitter are consistently among the top 20 most-viewed web sites of the Internet. Moreover, statistics show that, on average, users spend more time on popular social networking sites than on any other site.The tremendous increase in popularity of social networking sites allows them to collect a huge amount of personal information about the users, their friends, and their habits.Unfortunately, this wealth of information, as well as the ease with which one can reach many users, also attracted the interest of malicious parties. In particular, spammers are always looking for ways to reach new victims with their unsolicited messages. This is shown by a market survey about the user perception of spam over social networks, which shows that, in 2008, 83% of the users of social networks have received at least one unwanted friend request or message.
2. BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK
Social networks offer a way for users to keep track of their friends and communicate with them. This network of trust typically regulates which personal information is visible to whom.
Facebook is currently the largest social network on the Internet. On their website, the Facebook administrators claim to have more than 400 million active users all over the world, with over 2 billion media items (videos and pictures) shared every week.
MySpace was the first social network to gain significant popularity among Internet users. The basic idea of this network is to provide each user with a web page, which the user can then personalize with information about herself and her interests. Even though MySpace has also the concept of “friendship,” like Facebook, MySpace pages are public by default.
Twitter is a much simpler social network than Facebook and MySpace. It is designed as a microblogging platform,where users send short text messages (i.e., tweets) that appear on their friends’ pages. Unlike Facebook and MySpace, no personal information is shown on Twitter pages by default.
Related Work :
The success of social networks has attracted the attention of security researchers. Since social networks are strongly based on the notion of a network of trust, the exploitation of this trust might lead to significant consequences. In 2008, a Sophos experiment showed that 41% of the Facebook users who were contacted acknowledged a friend request from a random person [8]. Bilge et al. [10] show that after an attacker has entered the network of trust of a victim, the victim will likely click on any link contained in the messages posted, irrespective of whether she knows the attacker in real life or not.Brown et al. [12] showed how it would be possible for spammers to craft targeted spam by leveraging the infor mation available in online social networks. As for Twitter,
Krishnamurthy et al. studied the network, providing some characterization of Twitter users [14]. Yardi et al. [18] ran an experiment on Twitter spam. They created a popular hashtag on Twitter, and observed that spammers started using it in their messages. They also discuss some features that might allow one to distinguish a spammer from legitimate users, such as node degree and frequency of messages.Another work that studied social network spam using honey-profiles was conducted by Webb et al. in 2008 [17]. For this experiment, 51 profiles were created on MySpace, which was the largest social network at the time. The study showed a significant spam activity. The honey-profiles were contacted by 1,570 spam bots over a five-month period.
This system has detected thousands of spam accounts onTwitter, which have been subsequently deleted.
3. DATA COLLECTION
After creating honey-profiles observation on profile
On Facebook, we also observed a fair amount of invitations to applications, groups, and events, as well as posting of photos and videos in our honey-profiles’ feeds. However,since none of them were spam, we ignored them for the subsequent analysis.
Identification of Spam Accounts
Tables 1 and 2 show the breakdown of requests that were received by our honey-profiles. We can see that the honey-profiles did not only receive friend requests and messages from spammers, but also a surprising amount from legitimate accounts. Even if friend requests are unsolicited, they are not always the result of spammers who reach out. In particular, many social network users aim to increase their popularity by adding as friends people they do not know. On
Facebook, since all our honey-profiles were members of a geographic network (as long as these were available), it is also possible that people looking for local “friends” would have contacted some of our accounts. In particular, we observed that this occurs with more frequency on smaller networks (in particular, some Middle Eastern and African ones).
To Be Continue.........
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