Community-based features for identifying spammers in online social networks

Abstract

The popularity of Online Social Networks (OSNs) is often faced with challenges of dealing with undesirable users and their malicious activities in the social networks. The most common form of malicious activity over OSNs is spamming wherein a bot (fake user) disseminates content, malware/viruses, etc. to the legitimate users of the social networks. The common motives behind such activity include phishing, scams, viral marketing and so on which the recipients do not indent to receive. It is thus a highly desirable task to devise techniques and methods for identifying spammers (spamming accounts) in OSNs. With an aim of exploiting social network characteristics of community formation by legitimate users, this paper presents a community-based framework to identify spammers in OSNs. The framework uses community-based features of OSN users to learn classification models for identification of spamming accounts. The preliminary experiments on a real-world dataset with simulated spammers reveal that proposed approach is promising and that using community-based node features of OSN users can improve the performance of classifying spammers and legitimate users.