Spammers' networks within online social networks: a case-study on Twitter

Authors:
Saptarshi Ghosh;Gautam Korlam;Niloy Ganguly
Affiliations:
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur - 721302, India;Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur - 721302, India;Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur - 721302, India
Venue:
Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web
Year:
2011

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Abstract

We analyze the strategies employed by contemporary spammers in Online Social Networks (OSNs) by identifying a set of spam-accounts in Twitter and monitoring their link-creation strategies. Our analysis reveals that spammers adopt intelligent 'collaborative' strategies of link-formation to avoid detection and to increase the reach of their generated spam, such as forming 'spam-farms' and creating large number of links with targeted legitimate users. The observations are verified through the analysis of a giant 'spam-farm' embedded within the Twitter OSN.