Ahead of Print article · Preprint article · Journal article
Social Fingerprinting: detection of spambot groups through DNA-inspired behavioral modeling
Spambot detection in online social networks is a long-lasting challenge involving the study and design of detection techniques capable of efficiently identifying ever-evolving spammers. Recently, a new wave of social spambots has emerged, with advanced human-like characteristics that allow them to go undetected even by current state-of-the-art algorithms.
In this paper, we show that efficient spambots detection can be achieved via an in-depth analysis of their collective behaviors exploiting the digital DNA technique for modeling the behaviors of social network users. Inspired by its biological counterpart, in the digital DNA representation the behavioral lifetime of a digital account is encoded in a sequence of characters.
Then, we define a similarity measure for such digital DNA sequences. We build upon digital DNA and the similarity between groups of users to characterize both genuine accounts and spambots. Leveraging such characterization, we design the Social Fingerprinting technique, which is able to discriminate among spambots and genuine accounts in both a supervised and an unsupervised fashion.
We finally evaluate the effectiveness of Social Fingerprinting and we compare it with three state-of-the-art detection algorithms. Among the peculiarities of our approach is the possibility to apply off-the-shelf DNA analysis techniques to study online users behaviors and to efficiently rely on a limited number of lightweight account characteristics.
Language: | English |
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Publisher: | IEEE |
Year: | 2018 |
Pages: | 561-576 |
ISSN: | 19410018 , 21609209 and 15455971 |
Types: | Ahead of Print article , Preprint article and Journal article |
DOI: | 10.1109/TDSC.2017.2681672 |
Behavioral modeling Digital DNA Online social networks Social bots Spambot detection Twitter
Biological system modeling Computational modeling DNA DNA analysis techniques DNA technique DNA-inspired behavioral modeling Fingerprint recognition Informatics behavioral modeling biological counterpart cs.CR cs.LG cs.SI digital DNA digital DNA representation human-like characteristics online social networks online users behaviors social bots social fingerprinting social network users social networking (online) spambot detection spammers unsolicited e-mail unsupervised fashion