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. Twitter can suffer from malicious tweets containing suspicious URLs for spam, phishing, and malware distribution. Previous Twitter spam detection schemes have used account features such as the ratio of tweets containing URLs and the account creation date, or relation features in the Twitter graph. Malicious users, however, can easily fabricate account features. Moreover, extracting relation features from the Twitter graph is time and resource consuming. Previous suspicious URL detection schemes have classified URLs using several features including lexical features of URLs, URL redirection, HTML content, and dynamic behavior. However, evading techniques exist, such as time-based evasion and crawler evasion. In this paper, we propose WARNINGBIRD, a suspicious URL detection system for Twitter. Instead of focusing on the landing pages of individual URLs in each tweet, we consider correlated redirect chains of URLs in a number of tweets. Because attackers have limited resources and thus have to reuse them, a portion of their redirect chains will be shared. We focus on these shared resources to detect suspicious URLs. We have collected a large number of tweets from the Twitter public timeline and trained a statistical classifier with features derived from correlated URLs and tweet context information. Our classifier has high accuracy and low false-positive and falsenegative rates. We also present WARNINGBIRD as a realtime system for classifying suspicious URLs in the Twitter stream. ∗This research was supported by the MKE (The Ministry of Knowledge Economy), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program supervised by the NIPA (National IT Industry Promotion Agency) (NIPA-2011-C1090-1131-0009) and World Class University program funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology through the National Research Foundation of Korea(R31-10100). Twitter is prone to malicious tweets containing URLs for spam, phishing, and malware distribution. Conventional Twitter spam detection schemes utilize account features such as the ratio of tweets containing URLs and the account creation date, or relation features in the Twitter graph. These detection schemes are ineffective against feature fabrications or consume much time and resources. Conventional suspicious URL detection schemes utilize several features including lexical features of URLs, URL redirection, HTML content, and dynamic behavior. However, evading techniques such as time-based evasion and crawler evasion exist. In this paper, we propose WarningBird, a suspicious URL detection system for Twitter. Our system investigates correlations of URL redirect chains extracted from several tweets. Because attackers have limited resources and usually reuse them, their URL redirect chains frequently share the same URLs. We develop methods to discover correlated URL redirect chains using the frequently shared URLs and to determine their suspiciousness. We collect numerous tweets from the Twitter public timeline and build a statistical classifier using them. Evaluation results show that our classifier accurately and efficiently detects suspicious URLs. We also present WarningBird as a near real-time system for classifying suspicious URLs in the Twitter stream. The old Asian legend about the blind men and the elephant comes to mind when looking at how different authors of scientific papers describe a piece of related prior work. It turns out that different citations to the same paper often focus on different aspects of that paper and that neither provides a full description of its full set of contributions. In this article, we will describe our investigation of this phenomenon. We studied citation summaries in the context of research papers in the biomedical domain. A citation summary is the set of citing sentences for a given article and can be used as a surrogate for the actual article in a variety of scenarios. It contains information that was deemed by peers to be important. Our study shows that citation summaries overlap to some extent with the abstracts of the papers and that they also differ from them in that they focus on different aspects of these papers than do the abstracts. In addition to this, co-cited articles (which are pairs of articles cited by another article) tend to be similar. We show results based on a lexical similarity metric called cohesion to justify our claims. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Doxing is online abuse where a malicious party harms another by releasing identifying or sensitive information. Motivations for doxing include personal, competitive, and political reasons, and web users of all ages, genders and internet experience have been targeted. Existing research on doxing is primarily qualitative. This work improves our understanding of doxing by being the first to take a quantitative approach. We do so by designing and deploying a tool which can detect dox files and measure the frequency, content, targets, and effects of doxing on popular dox-posting sites. This work analyzes over 1.7 million text files posted to paste-bin.com, 4chan.org and 8ch.net, sites frequently used to share doxes online, over a combined period of approximately thirteen weeks. Notable findings in this work include that approximately 0.3 of shared files are doxes, that online social networking accounts mentioned in these dox files are more likely to close than typical accounts, that justice and revenge are the most often cited motivations for doxing, and that dox files target males more frequently than females. We also find that recent anti-abuse efforts by social networks have reduced how frequently these doxing victims closed or restricted their accounts after being attacked. We also propose mitigation steps, such a service that can inform people when their accounts have been shared in a dox file, or law enforcement notification tools to inform authorities when individuals are at heightened risk of abuse. Twitter spam detection is a recent area of research in which most previous works had focused on the identification of malicious user accounts and honeypot-based approaches. However, in this paper we present a methodology based on two new aspects: the detection of spam tweets in isolation and without previous information of the user; and the application of a statistical analysis of language to detect spam in trending topics. Trending topics capture the emerging Internet trends and topics of discussion that are in everybody's lips. This growing microblogging phenomenon therefore allows spammers to disseminate malicious tweets quickly and massively. In this paper we present the first work that tries to detect spam tweets in real time using language as the primary tool. We first collected and labeled a large dataset with 34K trending topics and 20million tweets. Then, we have proposed a reduced set of features hardly manipulated by spammers. In addition, we have developed a machine learning system with some orthogonal features that can be combined with other sets of features with the aim of analyzing emergent characteristics of spam in social networks. We have also conducted an extensive evaluation process that has allowed us to show how our system is able to obtain an F-measure at the same level as the best state-of-the-art systems based on the detection of spam accounts. Thus, our system can be applied to Twitter spam detection in trending topics in real time due mainly to the analysis of tweets instead of user accounts. Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to suggest an alternative to the widely used Times Cited criterion for analysing citation networks. The approach involves taking account of the natures of the papers that cite a given paper, so as to differentiate between papers that attract the same number of citations.Design methodology approach – ArticleRank is an algorithm that has been derived from Google's PageRank algorithm to measure the influence of journal articles. ArticleRank is applied to two datasets – a citation network based on an early paper on webometrics, and a self‐citation network based on the 19 most cited papers in the Journal of Documentation – using citation data taken from the Web of Knowledge database.Findings – ArticleRank values provide a different ranking of a set of papers from that provided by the corresponding Times Cited values, and overcomes the inability of the latter to differentiate between papers with the same numbers of citations. The difference in rankings between Times Cited ... Scholars are increasingly citing electronic “web references” which are not preserved in libraries or full text archives. WebCite is a new standard for citing web references. To “webcite” a document involves archiving the cited Web page through www.webcitation.org and citing the WebCite permalink instead of (or in addition to) the unstable live Web page. This journal has amended its “instructions for authors” accordingly, asking authors to archive cited Web pages before submitting a manuscript. Almost 200 other journals are already using the system. We discuss the rationale for WebCite, its technology, and how scholars, editors, and publishers can benefit from the service. Citing scholars initiate an archiving process of all cited Web references, ideally before they submit a manuscript. Authors of online documents and websites which are expected to be cited by others can ensure that their work is permanently available by creating an archived copy using WebCite and providing the citation information including the WebCite link on their Web document(s). Editors should ask their authors to cache all cited Web addresses (Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs) “prospectively” before submitting their manuscripts to their journal. Editors and publishers should also instruct their copyeditors to cache cited Web material if the author has not done so already. Finally, WebCite can process publisher submitted “citing articles” (submitted for example as eXtensible Markup Language [XML] documents) to automatically archive all cited Web pages shortly before or on publication. Finally, WebCite can act as a focussed crawler, caching retrospectively references of already published articles. Copyright issues are addressed by honouring respective Internet standards (robot exclusion files, no-cache and no-archive tags). Long-term preservation is ensured by agreements with libraries and digital preservation organizations. The resulting WebCite Index may also have applications for research assessment exercises, being able to measure the impact of Web services and published Web documents through access and Web citation metrics. @PARASPLIT [J Med Internet Res 2005;7(5):e60] Pattern recognition and machine learning techniques have been increasingly adopted in adversarial settings such as spam, intrusion, and malware detection, although their security against well-crafted attacks that aim to evade detection by manipulating data at test time has not yet been thoroughly assessed. While previous work has been mainly focused on devising adversary-aware classification algorithms to counter evasion attempts, only few authors have considered the impact of using reduced feature sets on classifier security against the same attacks. An interesting, preliminary result is that classifier security to evasion may be even worsened by the application of feature selection. In this paper, we provide a more detailed investigation of this aspect, shedding some light on the security properties of feature selection against evasion attacks. Inspired by previous work on adversary-aware classifiers, we propose a novel adversary-aware feature selection model that can improve classifier security against evasion attacks, by incorporating specific assumptions on the adversary's data manipulation strategy. We focus on an efficient, wrapper-based implementation of our approach, and experimentally validate its soundness on different application examples, including spam and malware detection. Increasing evidence suggests that a growing amount of social media content is generated by autonomous entities known as social bots. In this work we present a framework to detect such entities on Twitter. We leverage more than a thousand features extracted from public data and meta-data about users: friends, tweet content and sentiment, network patterns, and activity time series. We benchmark the classification framework by using a publicly available dataset of Twitter bots. This training data is enriched by a manually annotated collection of active Twitter users that include both humans and bots of varying sophistication. Our models yield high accuracy and agreement with each other and can detect bots of different nature. Our estimates suggest that between 9 and 15 of active Twitter accounts are bots. Characterizing ties among accounts, we observe that simple bots tend to interact with bots that exhibit more human-like behaviors. Analysis of content flows reveals retweet and mention strategies adopted by bots to interact with different target groups. Using clustering analysis, we characterize several subclasses of accounts, including spammers, self promoters, and accounts that post content from connected applications. A citing sentence is one that appears in a scientific article and cites previous work. Citing sentences have been studied and used in many applications. For example, they have been used in scientific paper summarization, automatic survey generation, paraphrase identification, and citation function classification. Citing sentences that cite multiple papers are common in scientific writing. This observation should be taken into consideration when using citing sentences in applications. For instance, when a citing sentence is used in a summary of a scientific paper, only the fragments of the sentence that are relevant to the summarized paper should be included in the summary. In this paper, we present and compare three different approaches for identifying the fragments of a citing sentence that are related to a given target reference. Our methods are: word classification, sequence labeling, and segment classification. Our experiments show that segment classification achieves the best results. To date, as one of the most popular online social networks (OSNs), Twitter is paying its dues as more and more spammers set their sights on this microblogging site. Twitter spammers can achieve their malicious goals such as sending spam, spreading malware, hosting botnet command and control (C&C) channels, and launching other underground illicit activities. Due to the significance and indispensability of detecting and suspending those spam accounts, many researchers along with the engineers at Twitter Inc. have devoted themselves to keeping Twitter as spam-free online communities. Most of the existing studies utilize machine learning techniques to detect Twitter spammers. “While the priest climbs a post, the devil climbs ten.” Twitter spammers are evolving to evade existing detection features. In this paper, we first make a comprehensive and empirical analysis of the evasion tactics utilized by Twitter spammers. We further design several new detection features to detect more Twitter spammers. In addition, to deeply understand the effectiveness and difficulties of using machine learning features to detect spammers, we analyze the robustness of 24 detection features that are commonly utilized in the literature as well as our proposed ones. Through our experiments, we show that our new designed features are much more effective to be used to detect (even evasive) Twitter spammers. According to our evaluation, while keeping an even lower false positive rate, the detection rate using our new feature set is also significantly higher than that of existing work. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first empirical study and evaluation of the effect of evasion tactics utilized by Twitter spammers and is a valuable supplement to this line of research. We present the results of a survey that collected information about the demographics of participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk, together with information about their level of activity and motivation for working on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We find that approximately 50 of the workers come from the United States and 40 come from India. Country of origin tends to change the motivating reasons for workers to participate in the marketplace. Significantly more workers from India participate on Mechanical Turk because the online marketplace is a primary source of income, while in the US most workers consider Mechanical Turk a secondary source of income. While money is a primary motivating reason for workers to participate in the marketplace, workers also cite a variety of other motivating reasons, including entertainment and education. The success of online social networks has attracted a constant interest in attacking and exploiting them. Attackers usually control malicious accounts, including both fake and compromised real user accounts, to launch attack campaigns such as social spam, malware distribution, and online rating distortion. To defend against these attacks, we design and implement a malicious account detection system called SynchroTrap. We observe that malicious accounts usually perform loosely synchronized actions in a variety of social network context. Our system clusters user accounts according to the similarity of their actions and uncovers large groups of malicious accounts that act similarly at around the same time for a sustained period of time. We implement SynchroTrap as an incremental processing system on Hadoop and Giraph so that it can process the massive user activity data in a large online social network efficiently. We have deployed our system in five applications at Facebook and Instagram. SynchroTrap was able to unveil more than two million malicious accounts and 1156 large attack campaigns within one month. Security issues are crucial in a number of machine learning applications, especially in scenarios dealing with human activity rather than natural phenomena (e.g., information ranking, spam detection, malware detection, etc.). In such cases, learning algorithms may have to cope with manipulated data aimed at hampering decision making. Although some previous work addressed the issue of handling malicious data in the context of supervised learning, very little is known about the behavior of anomaly detection methods in such scenarios. In this contribution, we analyze the performance of a particular method--online centroid anomaly detection--in the presence of adversarial noise. Our analysis addresses the following security-related issues: formalization of learning and attack processes, derivation of an optimal attack, and analysis of attack efficiency and limitations. We derive bounds on the effectiveness of a poisoning attack against centroid anomaly detection under different conditions: attacker's full or limited control over the traffic and bounded false positive rate. Our bounds show that whereas a poisoning attack can be effectively staged in the unconstrained case, it can be made arbitrarily difficult (a strict upper bound on the attacker's gain) if external constraints are properly used. Our experimental evaluation, carried out on real traces of HTTP and exploit traffic, confirms the tightness of our theoretical bounds and the practicality of our protection mechanisms. Given multimillion-node graphs such as "who-follows-whom", "patent-cites-patent", "user-likes-page" and "actor director-makes-movie" networks, how can we find unexpected behaviors? When companies operate on the graphs with monetary incentives to sell Twitter "Followers" and Facebook page "Likes", the graphs show strange connectivity patterns. In this paper, we study a complete graph from a large Twitter-style social network, spanning up to 3.33 billion edges. We report strange deviations from typical patterns like smooth degree distributions. We find that such deviations are often due to "lockstep behavior" that large groups of followers connect to the same groups of followees. Our first contribution is that we study strange patterns on the adjacency matrix and in the spectral subspaces with respect to several flavors of lockstep. We discover that (a) the lockstep behaviors on the graph shape dense "block" in its adjacency matrix and creates "rays" in spectral subspaces, and (b) partially overlapping of the behaviors shape "staircase" in its adjacency matrix and creates "pearls" in spectral subspaces. The second contribution is that we provide a fast algorithm, using the discovery as a guide for practitioners, to detect users who offer the lockstep behaviors in undirected directed bipartite graphs. We carry out extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, as well as public datasets from IMDb and US Patent. The results demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. How can web services that depend on user generated content discern fraudulent input by spammers from legitimate input? In this paper we focus on the social network Facebook and the problem of discerning ill-gotten Page Likes, made by spammers hoping to turn a profit, from legitimate Page Likes. Our method, which we refer to as CopyCatch, detects lockstep Page Like patterns on Facebook by analyzing only the social graph between users and Pages and the times at which the edges in the graph (the Likes) were created. We offer the following contributions: (1) We give a novel problem formulation, with a simple concrete definition of suspicious behavior in terms of graph structure and edge constraints. (2) We offer two algorithms to find such suspicious lockstep behavior - one provably-convergent iterative algorithm and one approximate, scalable MapReduce implementation. (3) We show that our method severely limits "greedy attacks" and analyze the bounds from the application of the Zarankiewicz problem to our setting. Finally, we demonstrate and discuss the effectiveness of CopyCatch at Facebook and on synthetic data, as well as potential extensions to anomaly detection problems in other domains. CopyCatch is actively in use at Facebook, searching for attacks on Facebook's social graph of over a billion users, many millions of Pages, and billions of Page Likes. In a document network such as a citation network of scientific documents, web-logs, etc., the content produced by authors exhibits their interest in certain topics. In addition some authors influence other authors' interests. In this work, we propose to model the influence of cited authors along with the interests of citing authors. Moreover, we hypothesize that apart from the citations present in documents, the context surrounding the citation mention provides extra topical information about the cited authors. However, associating terms in the context to the cited authors remains an open problem. We propose novel document generation schemes that incorporate the context while simultaneously modeling the interests of citing authors and influence of the cited authors. Our experiments show significant improvements over baseline models for various evaluation criteria such as link prediction between document and cited author, and quantitatively explaining unseen text. While machine learning (ML) models are being increasingly trusted to make decisions in different and varying areas, the safety of systems using such models has become an increasing concern. In particular, ML models are often trained on data from potentially untrustworthy sources, providing adversaries with the opportunity to manipulate them by inserting carefully crafted samples into the training set. Recent work has shown that this type of attack, called a poisoning attack, allows adversaries to insert backdoors or trojans into the model, enabling malicious behavior with simple external backdoor triggers at inference time and only a blackbox perspective of the model itself. Detecting this type of attack is challenging because the unexpected behavior occurs only when a backdoor trigger, which is known only to the adversary, is present. Model users, either direct users of training data or users of pre-trained model from a catalog, may not guarantee the safe operation of their ML-based system. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to backdoor detection and removal for neural networks. Through extensive experimental results, we demonstrate its effectiveness for neural networks classifying text and images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first methodology capable of detecting poisonous data crafted to insert backdoors and repairing the model that does not require a verified and trusted dataset. Citation relationship between scientific publications has been successfully used for scholarly bibliometrics, information retrieval and data mining tasks, and citation-based recommendation algorithms are well documented. While previous studies investigated citation relations from various viewpoints, most of them share the same assumption that, if paper1 cites paper2 (or author1 cites author2), they are connected, regardless of citation importance, sentiment, reason, topic, or motivation. However, this assumption is oversimplified. In this study, we employ an innovative "context-rich heterogeneous network" approach, which paves a new way for citation recommendation task. In the network, we characterize 1) the importance of citation relationships between citing and cited papers, and 2) the topical citation motivation. Unlike earlier studies, the citation information, in this paper, is characterized by citation textual contexts extracted from the full-text citing paper. We also propose algorithm to cope with the situation when large portion of full-text missing information exists in the bibliographic repository. Evaluation results show that, context-rich heterogeneous network can significantly enhance the citation recommendation performance.