As social networking sites have risen in popularity, cyber-criminals started to exploit these sites to spread malware and to carry out scams. Previous work has extensively studied the use of fake (Sybil) accounts that attackers set up to distribute spam messages (mostly messages that contain links to scam pages or drive-by download sites). Fake accounts typically exhibit highly anomalous behavi...

Fake followers are those Twitter accounts specifically created to inflate the number of followers of a target account. Fake followers are dangerous for the social platform and beyond, since they may alter concepts like popularity and influence in the Twittersphere—hence impacting on economy, politics, and society. In this paper, we contribute along different dimensions. First, we review some of...

Various online systems offer a lightweight process for creating accounts (e.g., confirming an e-mail address), so that users can easily join them. With minimum effort, however, an attacker can subvert this process, obtain a multitude of fake accounts, and use them for malicious purposes. Puzzle-based solutions have been proposed to limit the spread of fake accounts, by establishing a price (in ...

We present a study of Fake Anti-Virus attacks on the web. Fake AV software masquerades as a legitimate security product with the goal of deceiving victims into paying registration fees to seemingly remove malware from their computers. Our analysis of 240 million web pages collected by Google’s malware detection infrastructure over a 13 month period discovered over 11,000 domains involved in Fak...

This paper presents a method to validate the true patrons of a brand, group, artist or any other entity on the social networking site Twitter. We analyze the trend of total number of tweets, average retweets and total number of followers for various nodes for different social and political backgrounds. We argue that average retweets to follower ratio reveals the overall value of the individual ...

The open nature of the Web, online social networks (OSNs) in particular, makes it possible to design socialbots—automation software that controls fake accounts in a target OSN, and has the ability to perform basic activities similar to those of real users. In the wrong hands, socialbots can be used to infiltrate online communities, build up trust over time, and then engage in various malicious ...