As businesses increasingly rely on social networking sites to engage with their customers, it is crucial to understand and counter reputation manipulation activities, including fraudulently boosting the number of Facebook page likes using like farms. To this end, several fraud detection algorithms have been proposed and some deployed by Facebook that use graph co-clustering to distinguish between genuine likes and those generated by farm-controlled profiles. However, as we show in this paper, these tools do not work well with stealthy farms whose users spread likes over longer timespans and like popular pages, aiming to mimic regular users. We present an empirical analysis of the graph-based detection tools used by Facebook and highlight their shortcomings against more sophisticated farms. Next, we focus on characterizing content generated by social networks accounts on their timelines, as an indicator of genuine versus fake social activity. We analyze a wide range of features extracted from timeline posts, which we group into two main classes: lexical and non-lexical. We postulate and verify that like farm accounts tend to often re-share content, use fewer words and poorer vocabulary, and more often generate duplicate comments and likes compared to normal users. We extract relevant lexical and non-lexical features and and use them to build a classifier to detect like farms accounts, achieving significantly higher accuracy, namely, at least 99 precision and 93 recall.
Our classifier is trained using accounts obtained from honeypots, somewhat similar to previous work in the context of spam in MySpace and Twitter @cite_9 @cite_0 . Our work uses accounts attracted by Facebook pages actively engaging like farms and, unlike @cite_9 @cite_0 , leverages timeline-based features for the detection. @cite_30 study the human involvement in Weibo's reputation manipulation services, showing that simple evasion attacks (e.g., workers modifying their behavior) as well as poisoning attacks (e.g., administrators tampering with the training set) can severely affect the effectiveness of machine learning algorithms to detect malicious crowd-sourcing workers. Partially informed by their work, we do not only cluster like activity performed by users but also build on lexical and non-lexical features.
@cite_0 @cite_9 @cite_30
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Recent work in security and systems has embraced the use of machine learning (ML) techniques for identifying misbehavior, e.g. email spam and fake (Sybil) users in social networks. However, ML models are typically derived from fixed datasets, and must be periodically retrained. In adversarial environments, attackers can adapt by modifying their behavior or even sabotaging ML models by polluting training data. In this paper, we perform an empirical study of adversarial attacks against machine learning models in the context of detecting malicious crowdsourcing systems, where sites connect paying users with workers willing to carry out malicious campaigns. By using human workers, these systems can easily circumvent deployed security mechanisms, e.g. CAPTCHAs. We collect a dataset of malicious workers actively performing tasks on Weibo, China's Twitter, and use it to develop ML-based detectors. We show that traditional ML techniques are accurate (95 -99 ) in detection but can be highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, including simple evasion attacks (workers modify their behavior) and powerful poisoning attacks (where administrators tamper with the training set). We quantify the robustness of ML classifiers by evaluating them in a range of practical adversarial models using ground truth data. Our analysis provides a detailed look at practical adversarial attacks on ML models, and helps defenders make informed decisions in the design and configuration of ML detectors. The main contribution of this paper is a simple semi-supervised pipeline that only uses the original training set without collecting extra data. It is challenging in 1) how to obtain more training data only from the training set and 2) how to use the newly generated data. In this work, the generative adversarial network (GAN) is used to generate unlabeled samples. We propose the label smoothing regularization for outliers (LSRO). This method assigns a uniform label distribution to the unlabeled images, which regularizes the supervised model and improves the baseline. We verify the proposed method on a practical problem: person re-identification (re-ID). This task aims to retrieve a query person from other cameras. We adopt the deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN) for sample generation, and a baseline convolutional neural network (CNN) for representation learning. Experiments show that adding the GAN-generated data effectively improves the discriminative ability of learned CNN embeddings. On three large-scale datasets, Market-1501, CUHK03 and DukeMTMC-reID, we obtain +4.37 , +1.6 and +2.46 improvement in rank-1 precision over the baseline CNN, respectively. We additionally apply the proposed method to fine-grained bird recognition and achieve a +0.6 improvement over a strong baseline. The code is available at this https URL Recommending phrases from web pages for advertisers to bid on against search engine queries is an important research problem with direct commercial impact. Most approaches have found it infeasible to determine the relevance of all possible queries to a given ad landing page and have focussed on making recommendations from a small set of phrases extracted (and expanded) from the page using NLP and ranking based techniques. In this paper, we eschew this paradigm, and demonstrate that it is possible to efficiently predict the relevant subset of queries from a large set of monetizable ones by posing the problem as a multi-label learning task with each query being represented by a separate label. We develop Multi-label Random Forests to tackle problems with millions of labels. Our proposed classifier has prediction costs that are logarithmic in the number of labels and can make predictions in a few milliseconds using 10 Gb of RAM. We demonstrate that it is possible to generate training data for our classifier automatically from click logs without any human annotation or intervention. We train our classifier on tens of millions of labels, features and training points in less than two days on a thousand node cluster. We develop a sparse semi-supervised multi-label learning formulation to deal with training set biases and noisy labels harvested automatically from the click logs. This formulation is used to infer a belief in the state of each label for each training ad and the random forest classifier is extended to train on these beliefs rather than the given labels. Experiments reveal significant gains over ranking and NLP based techniques on a large test set of 5 million ads using multiple metrics. With the growing adoption of machine learning, sharing of learned models is becoming popular. However, in addition to the prediction properties the model producer aims to share, there is also a risk that the model consumer can infer other properties of the training data the model producer did not intend to share. In this paper, we focus on the inference of global properties of the training data, such as the environment in which the data was produced, or the fraction of the data that comes from a certain class, as applied to white-box Fully Connected Neural Networks (FCNNs). Because of their complexity and inscrutability, FCNNs have a particularly high risk of leaking unexpected information about their training sets; at the same time, this complexity makes extracting this information challenging. We develop techniques that reduce this complexity by noting that FCNNs are invariant under permutation of nodes in each layer. We develop our techniques using representations that capture this invariance and simplify the information extraction task. We evaluate our techniques on several synthetic and standard benchmark datasets and show that they are very effective at inferring various data properties. We also perform two case studies to demonstrate the impact of our attack. In the first case study we show that a classifier that recognizes smiling faces also leaks information about the relative attractiveness of the individuals in its training set. In the second case study we show that a classifier that recognizes Bitcoin mining from performance counters also leaks information about whether the classifier was trained on logs from machines that were patched for the Meltdown and Spectre attacks.