Detecting and characterizing social spam campaigns

Online social networks (OSNs) are popular collaboration and communication tools for millions of users and their friends. Unfortunately, in the wrong hands, they are also effective tools for executing spam campaigns and spreading malware. Intuitively, a user is more likely to respond to a message from a Facebook friend than from a stranger, thus making social spam a more effective distribution mechanism than traditional email. In fact, existing evidence shows malicious entities are already attempting to compromise OSN account credentials to support these "high-return" spam campaigns. In this paper, we present an initial study to quantify and characterize spam campaigns launched using accounts on online social networks. We study a large anonymized dataset of asynchronous "wall" messages between Facebook users. We analyze all wall messages received by roughly 3.5 million Facebook users (more than 187 million messages in all), and use a set of automated techniques to d...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Hongyu Gao, Jun Hu, Christo Wilson, Zhichun Li, Yan Chen, Ben Y. Zhao
• Keywords: CCS 2010, Facebook Users, Malicious Wall Posts, Security Privacy, Spam Campaigns