Spam Content Research Articles

WSF2: A Novel Framework for Filtering Web Spam

Over the last years, research on web spam filtering has gained interest from both academia and industry. In this context, although there are a good number of successful antispam techniques available (i.e., content-based, link-based, and hiding), an adequate combination of different algorithms supported by an advanced web spam filtering platform would offer more promising results. To this end, we propose the WSF2 framework, a new platform particularly suitable for filtering spam content on web pages. Currently, our framework allows the easy combination of different filtering techniques including, but not limited to, regular expressions and well-known classifiers (i.e., Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machines, and C5.0). Applying our WSF2 framework over the publicly available WEBSPAM-UK2007 corpus, we have been able to demonstrate that a simple combination of different techniques is able to improve the accuracy of single classifiers on web spam detection. As a result, we conclude that the proposed filtering platform is a powerful tool for boosting applied research in this area.

A dynamic model for integrating simple web spam classification techniques

Over the last years, Internet spam content has spread enormously inside web sites mainly due to the emergence of new web technologies oriented towards the online sharing of resources and information. In such a situation, both academia and industry have shown their concern to accurately detect and effectively control web spam, resulting in a good number of anti-spam techniques currently available. However, the successful integration of different algorithms for web spam classification is still a challenge. In this context, the present study introduces WSF2, a novel web spam filtering framework specifically designed to take advantage of multiple classification schemes and algorithms. In detail, our approach encodes the life cycle of a case-based reasoning system, being able to use appropriate knowledge and dynamically adjust different parameters to ensure continuous improvement in filtering precision with the passage of time. In order to correctly evaluate the effectiveness of the dynamic model, we designed a set of experiments involving a publicly available corpus, as well as different simple well-known classifiers and ensemble approaches. The results revealed that WSF2 performed well, being able to take advantage of each classifier and to achieve a better performance when compared to other alternatives. WSF2 is an open-source project licensed under the terms of the LGPL publicly available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/wsf2c/.

A Comparative Study of Email Forensic Tools

Over the last decades, email has been the major carrier for transporting spam and malicious contents over the network. Email is also the primary source of numerous criminal activities on the Internet. Computer Forensics is a systematic process to retain and analyze saved emails for the purpose of legal proceedings and other civil matters. Email analysis is challenging due to not only various fields that can be forged by hackers or malicious users, but also the flexibility of composing, editing, deleting of emails using offline (e.g., MS Outlook) or online (e.g., Web mail) email applications. Towards this direction, a number of open source forensics tools have been widely used by the practitioners. However, these tools have been developed in an isolated manner rather than a collaborative approach. Given that email forensic tool users need to understand to what extent a tool would be useful for his/her circumstances and conducting forensic analysis accordingly. In this paper, we examine a set of common features to compare and contrast five popular open source email forensic tools. The study finds that all email forensic tools are not similar, offer diverse types of facility. By combining analysis tools, it may be possible to gain detailed information in the area of email forensic.

A link and Content Hybrid Approach for Arabic Web Spam Detection

Some Web sites developers act as spammers and try to mislead the search engines by using illegal Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) tips to increase the rank of their Web documents, to be more visible at the top 10 SERP. This is since gaining more visitors for marketing and commercial goals. This study is a continuation of a series of Arabic Web spam studies conducted by the authors, where this study is dedicated to build the first Arabic content/link Web spam detection system. This Novel system is capable to extract the set of content and link features of Web pages, in order to build the largest Arabic Web spam dataset. The constructed dataset contains three groups with the following three percentages of spam contents: 2%, 30%, and 40%. These three groups with varying percentages of spam contents were collected through the embedded crawler in the proposed system. The automated classification of spam Web pages used based on the features in the benchmark dataset. The proposed system used the rules of Decision Tree; which is considered as the best classifier to detect Arabic content/link Web spam. The proposed system helps to clean the SERP from all URLs referring to Arabic spam Web pages. It produces accuracy of 90.1099% for Arabic content- based, 93.1034% for Arabic link-based, and 89.011% in detecting both Arabic content and link Web spam, based on the collected dataset and conducted analysis.

The Study of Content Security for Mobile Internet

The vast amount of information carried over Mobile Internet and the high speed are providing unprecedented convenience for users, Mobile Internet is facing growing threat of lack of security. It is crucial to maintain and improve safety and security for Mobile Internet for it to thrive and develop. At content level, users are facing increasing amount of malicious or spam content, jeopardizing public's interest in legitimate internet content. Therefore, Mobile Internet information security has become an important research topic. In this paper we first propose a framework for content security management system for Mobile Internet, and then discuss how to acquire relevant information from Mobile Internet in a fast and efficient manner, how to process and analyze the vast amount of information collected, how to quickly discover negative or illegal information within the network, and provide detection and early warnings for potential hot topics. At the same time, we study how to perform audit and evaluation on the information content so that the relevant security management actions can be done.

Content-based analysis to detect Arabic web spam

Search engines are important outlets for information query and retrieval. They have to deal with the continual increase of information available on the web, and provide users with convenient access to such huge amounts of information. Furthermore, with this huge amount of information, a more complex challenge that continuously gets more and more difficult to illuminate is the spam in web pages. For several reasons, web spammers try to intrude in the search results and inject artificially biased results in favour of their websites or pages. Spam pages are added to the internet on a daily basis, thus making it difficult for search engines to keep up with the fast-growing and dynamic nature of the web, especially since spammers tend to add more keywords to their websites to deceive the search engines and increase the rank of their pages. In this research, we have investigated four different classification algorithms (naïve Bayes, decision tree, SVM and K-NN) to detect Arabic web spam pages, based on content. The three groups of datasets used, with 1%, 15% and 50% spam contents, were collected using a crawler that was customized for this study. Spam pages were classified manually. Different tests and comparisons have revealed that the Decision Tree was the best classifier for this purpose.

Google Scholar duped and deduped – the aura of “robometrics”

PurposeThis purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the problems that exist with Google Scholar, particularly regarding content spam and citation spam.Design/methodology/approachThe paper provides an analysis of how Google Scholar has been duped by real but manipulated documents and reference lists, as well as by fake documents and references. Details of research regarding the duping of Google Scholar is presented and a possible solution is offered.FindingsResearchers showed how easy it was to dupe Google Scholar. In one case, the researchers added invisible words to the first page of one of their conference papers (using the well‐known white letter on white screen/paper technique), and modified the content and bibliography of some of their already published papers, then posted them on the web to see if Google Scholar would bite, i.e. would improve their rank position, and increase the number of citations that the targeted papers received, and the number of papers published by the authors. Google Scholar did bite. While the size of Google Scholar kept growing at an impressive rate, the intellectual growth of the Google Scholar software has been stunted.Originality/valueThe paper makes the point that the best move from Google Scholar would be to realise that the existing metadata created by competent human indexers, cataloguers, librarians and other information professionals for tens of millions of scholarly documents is far superior to the parser's results.

Ethical dimensions of spam

The explosion of spam within the world's e-mail system has seriously impaired the usefulness of e-mail as a reliable and trustworthy medium for interpersonal communication. Spam raises important societal concerns that are potentially corrosive in their impact. This paper considers the origins of spam and describes in some detail spam's application and content. In addition, this paper explores the role that spam filtering and blocking plays in the administration of e-mail services. The ultimate objective of this paper is to apply the ethical framework developed by Berenheim (1988) to better understand the impact that spam has on e-mail users and to examine the ethical issues connected with the distribution and regulation of spam.

A Chronicle of a Journey

Every email that originates from outside of an organization must go through a series of firewalls and gateways before reaching the intended recipient inside the organization. During this journey, each email may get scanned for possible viruses or other malicious programming codes. In some cases, the e-mail may also receive a score based on the possibility of spam content. On any stage of this processing email can be quarantined, or moved to a spam folder for the future possible analysis or simply deleted. Understandably, such complex structure helps secure the company’s internal infrastructure, however, e-mails have become an important tool in marketing for many e-commerce organizations and if marketing e-mails do not get to their intended receiver, the sending company will be disadvantaged. Therefore, from the point of view of the sender of an e-mail, it is important to understand the faith of the e-mail that was sent and whether it was received as intended. In this case study, we describe an e-mail bounce back system that was developed by a major e-commerce company in order to understand whether its e-mail based marketing was successful in delivering the intended message to its customers. In addition to the describing the development of the system, security and privacy issues are also discussed.

Knowledge Transfer

Knowledge transfer has been an important issue for organizational knowledge management programs. This article reviews the plethora of user-generated video activity and the issues it creates for knowledge management activities. Video’s media richness combined with its ability to convey rich narratives can facilitate sensemaking and learning. However, structure and culture are important factors that must be considered in story telling activities to increase the opportunity for effective sensemaking and message retention. Evidence and arguments are presented that should motivate organizations and academics to review video generation activities both internal and external to the organization. Issues concerning video content delivery, liability, spam, and search engine capabilities are discussed. Opportunities for new research inquiries are identified.