Network Analysis of Recurring Twitter Spam Campaign

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) such as Twitter and Facebook have become popular communication and information sharing tools for hundreds of millions of individuals in recent years. OSNs not only make peoples life more connected, but also attract the interest of spammers. Twitter spam generally contains deceptive information, such as free voucher and weight loss advertisement to attract the interest of victims. A comprehensive analysis on the deceptive information will be of great benefit to the detection of Twitter spam. Twitter has now become one of the largest online social network sites. Over 500 million registered users spend vast time making friends with people who they are familiar with or interested in. For Twitter users, after relationships are built, they can receive tweets, usually something interesting or recent activities shared by their friends. Nowadays, Twitter has largely shortened the distance of people, and reshaped the way they communicate with each other. Current security experts suggest the best defense against spam is to educate Internet users to never click suspicious links in tweets. In the real world, however, the effectiveness of education is far from our expectations. Spammers leverage some certain deceptive topics, such as gain followers, cracked games, i.e. to lure users to click their malicious links. We refer this kind of information as deceptive information. The deceptive information is one of the key factors to the spreading efficiency of spam on Twitter. A better understanding of deceptive information is crucial to spam detection techniques. Therefore, we are motivated to thoroughly study the deceptive information employed by spammers.