Browsing by Subject "Spam"
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Item Combating Threats to the Quality of Information in Social Systems(2013-06-04) Lee, KyuminMany large-scale social systems such as Web-based social networks, online social media sites and Web-scale crowdsourcing systems have been growing rapidly, enabling millions of human participants to generate, share and consume content on a massive scale. This reliance on users can lead to many positive effects, including large-scale growth in the size and content in the community, bottom-up discovery of ?citizen-experts?, serendipitous discovery of new resources beyond the scope of the system designers, and new social-based information search and retrieval algorithms. But the relative openness and reliance on users coupled with the widespread interest and growth of these social systems carries risks and raises growing concerns over the quality of information in these systems. In this dissertation research, we focus on countering threats to the quality of information in self-managing social systems. Concretely, we identify three classes of threats to these systems: (i) content pollution by social spammers, (ii) coordinated campaigns for strategic manipulation, and (iii) threats to collective attention. To combat these threats, we propose three inter-related methods for detecting evidence of these threats, mitigating their impact, and improving the quality of information in social systems. We augment this three-fold defense with an exploration of their origins in ?crowdturfing? ? a sinister counterpart to the enormous positive opportunities of crowdsourcing. In particular, this dissertation research makes four unique contributions: ? The first contribution of this dissertation research is a framework for detecting and filtering social spammers and content polluters in social systems. To detect and filter individual social spammers and content polluters, we propose and evaluate a novel social honeypot-based approach. ? Second, we present a set of methods and algorithms for detecting coordinated campaigns in large-scale social systems. We propose and evaluate a content- driven framework for effectively linking free text posts with common ?talking points? and extracting campaigns from large-scale social systems. ? Third, we present a dual study of the robustness of social systems to collective attention threats through both a data-driven modeling approach and deploy- ment over a real system trace. We evaluate the effectiveness of countermeasures deployed based on the first moments of a bursting phenomenon in a real system. ? Finally, we study the underlying ecosystem of crowdturfing for engaging in each of the three threat types. We present a framework for ?pulling back the curtain? on crowdturfers to reveal their underlying ecosystem on both crowdsourcing sites and social media.Item Spammer Detection on Online Social Networks(2012-12-04) Amlesahwaram, Amit AnandTwitter with its rising popularity as a micro-blogging website has inevitably attracted attention of spammers. Spammers use myriad of techniques to lure victims into clicking malicious URLs. In this thesis, we present several novel features capable of distinguishing spam accounts from legitimate accounts in real-time. The features exploit the behavioral and content entropy, bait-techniques, community-orientation, and profile characteristics of spammers. We then use supervised learning algorithms to generate models using the proposed features and show that our tool, spAmbush, can detect spammers in real-time. Our analysis reveals detection of more than 90% of spammers with less than five tweets and more than half with only a single tweet. Our feature computation has low latency and resource requirement. Our results show a 96% detection rate with only 0.01% false positive rate. We further cluster the unknown spammers to identify and understand the prevalent spam campaigns on Twitter.