TY - GEN
T1 - On the impact of social botnets for spam distribution and digital-influence manipulation
AU - Zhang, Jinxue
AU - Zhang, Rui
AU - Zhang, Yanchao
AU - Yan, Guanhua
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Online social networks (OSNs) are increasingly threatened by social bots which are software-controlled OSN accounts that mimic human users with malicious intentions. A social botnet refers to a group of social bots under the control of a single botmaster, which collaborate to conduct malicious behavior, while at the same time mimicking the interactions among normal OSN users to reduce their individual risk of being detected. We demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of exploiting a social botnet for spam distribution and digital-influence manipulation through real experiments on Twitter and also trace-driven simulations. Our results can help understand the potentially detrimental effects of social botnets and help OSNs improve their bot(net) detection systems.
AB - Online social networks (OSNs) are increasingly threatened by social bots which are software-controlled OSN accounts that mimic human users with malicious intentions. A social botnet refers to a group of social bots under the control of a single botmaster, which collaborate to conduct malicious behavior, while at the same time mimicking the interactions among normal OSN users to reduce their individual risk of being detected. We demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of exploiting a social botnet for spam distribution and digital-influence manipulation through real experiments on Twitter and also trace-driven simulations. Our results can help understand the potentially detrimental effects of social botnets and help OSNs improve their bot(net) detection systems.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84893546328&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84893546328&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/CNS.2013.6682691
DO - 10.1109/CNS.2013.6682691
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84893546328
SN - 9781479908950
T3 - 2013 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security, CNS 2013
SP - 46
EP - 54
BT - 2013 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security, CNS 2013
PB - IEEE Computer Society
T2 - 1st IEEE International Conference on Communications and Network Security, CNS 2013
Y2 - 14 October 2013 through 16 October 2013
ER -