Malicious and Low Credibility URLs on Twitter During the AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine Development

Abstract

This study provides an in-depth analysis of a Twitter dataset around AstraZeneca COVID vaccine development released as a part of Grand Challenge

The development of phishing during the COVID-19 pandemic: An analysis of over 1100 targeted domains

“…Also natural language processing techniques ( Sahingoz et al., 2019 ) and Shannon’s entropy ( Verma and Das, 2017 ) are used to determine the maliciousness of a URL. At last, a case study on Twitter data explores the malicious and inconsistent URLs during Covid-19 to identify link-sharing patterns ( Horawalavithana et al., 2021 ). The author suggests improving topic moderation techniques on Twitter data that mitigate the intent of poor players in promoting malicious activities.…”

Cross-platform information spread during the January 6th capitol riots

“…These external websites shared are often along ideological or political lines on social media platforms like Twitter Kuzma et al (2021) and have been observed to share deceptive content in a coordinated manner (i.e., during the 2019 European elections (Pierri et al 2020)). External websites have also shown to be an important part of misinformation-laden conversations like the Twitter discourse around the COVID-19 vaccination and are often used to spread misinformation (Cruickshank et al 2021;Horawalavithana et al 2021). Additionally, YouTube videos have been heavily spread on social media platforms and used in a wide range of mis/ disinformation campaigns.…”

“…Analysis of link sharing behavior has also given rise to observations of coordinated link sharing behavior. Recent work highlights that mis/disinformation campaigns not only spread external websites on social media platforms but also do so in a coordinated manner (Pacheco et al 2021;Horawalavithana et al 2021;Giglietto et al 2020). This coordinated link sharing behavior further spreads the mis/disinformation on the external website by getting the website to trend higher on the social media platform and hence artificially boosting its popularity (Giglietto et al 2020).…”

“…These form the need for the emerging field of social cybersecurity field which aims to aid building healthy online communities. Recent research in the field has identified the use of external content like URLs (Horawalavithana et al 2021;Giglietto st al. 2020;Cruickshank et al 2021) and cross-platform behaviors Kin and Sameera 2021;Iamnitchi et al 2020) in the spread of mis/ disinformation.…”