Towards Online Spam Filtering in Social Networks Hongyu Gao Yan Chen Kathy Lee† Northwestern University Northwestern University Northwestern University Evanston, IL, USA Evanston, IL, USA Evanston, IL, USA
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Diana Palsetia† Alok Choudhary† Northwestern University Northwestern University Evanston, IL, USA Evanston, IL, USA
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract idence shows that they can also be effective mechanisms for spreading attacks. Popular OSNs are increasingly be- Online social networks (OSNs) are extremely popular coming the target of phishing attacks launched from large among Internet users. Unfortunately, in the wrong hands, botnets [1, 3]. Two recent studies [9, 10] have confirmed they are also effective tools for executing spam campaigns. the existence of large-scale spam campaigns in Twitter and In this paper, we present an online spam filtering system that Facebook, respectively. Furthermore, the clickthrough rate can be deployed as a component of the OSN platform to in- of OSN spam is orders of magnitude higher than its email spect messages generated by users in real-time. We propose counterpart [10], indicating that users are more prone to to reconstruct spam messages into campaigns for classifica- trust spam messages from their friends in OSNs. tion rather than examine them individually. Although cam- The OSN spam problem has already received atten- paign identification has been used for offline spam analysis, tion from researchers. Meanwhile, email spam, a seem- we apply this technique to aid the online spam detection ingly very similar problem, has been extensively studied for problem with sufficiently low overhead.