Exploiting abused trending topics to identify spam

Authors: Despoina Antonakaki Iasonas Polakis Elias Athanasopoulos Sotiris Ioannidis Paraskevi Fragopoulou

Publish Date: 2016/07/13

Volume: 6, Issue: 1, Pages: 48-

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Abstract

Twitter is an online social network OSN with approximately 650 million users It has been fairly characterized as one of the most influential OSNs since it includes public figures organizations news media and official authorities Twitter has an inherent simple philosophy with short messages friendship relations hashtags and support for media sharing such as photos and short videos Popular hashtags that emerge from users’ activity are displayed prominently in the platform as Popular Trends Unfortunately the capabilities of the platform can be also abused and exploited for distributing illicit content or boosting false information and the consequences of such actions can be really severe one false tweet was enough for making the stock market crash for a short period of time in 2013 In this study we make an experimental analysis on a large dataset containing 150 million tweets We delve into the dynamics of the popular trends as well as other Twitter features in regard to deliberate misuse We investigate traditional spam techniques as well as an obfuscated way of spam campaigns that exploit trending topics and hides malicious URLs within Google search result links We implement a simple and lightweight classifier for indentifying spam users as well as spam tweets Finally we visualize these spam campaigns and investigate their inner propertiesWe would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments This work was supported by the FP7 MarieCurie ITN iSocial funded by the EC under Grant Agreement No 316808 This work was also supported by the NSF Grant CNS1318415 FP7PEOPLE2010IOF Project XHUNTER No 273765 Prevention of and Fight against Crime Programme of the European CommissionDirectorateGeneral Home Affairs Project GCC European Union’s Prevention of and Fight against Crime Programme Íllegal Use of Interneté ISEC 2010 Action Grants Grant Ref HOME/2010/ISEC/AG/INT002

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