Understanding and Fighting Malicious Activity on Online Social Networks

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• Gianluca Stringhini, University College London
• Thursday 05 February 2015, 11:00-12:00
• Room 245, School of Computer Science.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Matthijs Melissen.

Online Social Networks rely heavily on networks of trust and on user popularity. Users believe to content that is posted by people they know in real life, or by famous people they admire and respect. Cybercriminals who want to misuse social networks for their nefarious goals need to gain trust from their victims as well. Miscreants can do this in two ways: first, they can hijack a reputable account and use it to spread malicious content. This way, users who trust this account will be more likely to re-share this content, or to click on the links that are posted by it. Second, they can build a fake reputation for accounts they control, by purchasing fake followers, fake likes, or fake retweets for example. In this talk I will provide an overview of our work in detecting malicious activity on online social networks. First, I will present COMPA , a system that is able to detect and block messages that have been sent by a social network account but that were not authored by the legitimate owner of the account, but by an attacker who hijacked it. Then I will provide an overview of our efforts in detecting accounts that build a fake reputation on Twitter by purchasing followers. I will then discuss some open research areas in the field of fighting cybercriminal activity on social networks.

This talk is part of the Computer Security Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Computer Science Departmental Series
• Computer Science Distinguished Seminars
• Computer Security Seminars
• Room 245, School of Computer Science
• computer sience

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