000000258 001__ 258
000000258 005__ 20130522141941.0
000000258 037__ $$aLERSSE-RefConfPaper-2011-008
000000258 088__ $$a258
000000258 100__ $$aYazan Boshmaf
000000258 245__ $$aThe Socialbot Network: When Bots Socialize for Fame and Money
000000258 260__ $$c2011-09-27
000000258 300__ $$a10
000000258 520__ $$aOnline Social Networks (OSNs) have become an integral part of today's Web. Politicians, celebrities, revolutionists, and others use OSNs as a podium to deliver their message to millions of active web users. Unfortunately, in the wrong hands, OSNs can be used to run astroturf campaigns to spread misinformation and propaganda. Such campaigns usually start off by infiltrating a targeted OSN on a large scale. In this paper, we evaluate how vulnerable OSNs are to a large-scale infiltration by socialbots: computer programs that control OSN accounts and mimic real users. We adopt a traditional web-based botnet design and built a Socialbot Network (SbN): a group of adaptive socialbots that are orchestrated in a command-and-control fashion. We operated such an SbN on Facebook—a 750 million user OSN—for about 8 weeks. We collected data related to users' behavior in response to a large-scale infiltration where socialbots were used to connect to a large number of Facebook users. Our results show that (1) OSNs, such as Facebook, can be infiltrated with a success rate of up to 80%, (2) depending on users' privacy settings, a successful infiltration can result in privacy breaches where even more users' data are exposed when compared to a purely public access, and (3) in practice, OSN security defenses, such as the Facebook Immune System, are not effective enough in detecting or stopping a large-scale infiltration as it occurs.
000000258 6531_ $$aOnline Social Networks
000000258 6531_ $$aSocial Network Security
000000258 6531_ $$aLarge-scale Infiltration
000000258 6531_ $$aSocialbots
000000258 6531_ $$aBotnets
000000258 700__ $$aIldar Muslukhov
000000258 700__ $$aKonstantin Beznosov
000000258 700__ $$aMatei Ripeanu
000000258 8560_ $$fboshmaf@ece.ubc.ca
000000258 8564_ $$uhttp://lersse-dl.ece.ubc.ca/record/258/files/258.pdf$$yTransfer from CDS 0.99.7
000000258 909C4 $$pYazan Boshmaf, Ildar Muslukhov, Konstantin Beznosov, and Matei Ripeanu. The socialbot network: when bots socialize for fame and money. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'11), December 2011
000000258 980__ $$aRefConfPaper