scholarly journals A Survey of Attacks Against Twitter Spam Detectors in an Adversarial Environment

Robotics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niddal H. Imam ◽  
Vassilios G. Vassilakis
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Defense Mechanism ◽  
Malware Detection ◽  
Test Phase ◽  
Design Stage ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Prediction Test ◽  
New Type

Online Social Networks (OSNs), such as Facebook and Twitter, have become a very important part of many people’s daily lives. Unfortunately, the high popularity of these platforms makes them very attractive to spammers. Machine learning (ML) techniques have been widely used as a tool to address many cybersecurity application problems (such as spam and malware detection). However, most of the proposed approaches do not consider the presence of adversaries that target the defense mechanism itself. Adversaries can launch sophisticated attacks to undermine deployed spam detectors either during training or the prediction (test) phase. Not considering these adversarial activities at the design stage makes OSNs’ spam detectors vulnerable to a range of adversarial attacks. Thus, this paper surveys the attacks against Twitter spam detectors in an adversarial environment, and a general taxonomy of potential adversarial attacks is presented using common frameworks from the literature. Examples of adversarial activities on Twitter that were discovered after observing Arabic trending hashtags are discussed in detail. A new type of spam tweet (adversarial spam tweet), which can be used to undermine a deployed classifier, is examined. In addition, possible countermeasures that could increase the robustness of Twitter spam detectors to such attacks are investigated.

scholarly journals A Survey of Attacks Against Twitter Spam Detectors in an Adversarial Environment

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niddal Imam
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Defense Mechanism ◽  
Malware Detection ◽  
Test Phase ◽  
Design Stage ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Prediction Test ◽  
New Type

Online Social Networks (OSNs), such as Facebook and Twitter, have become a very important part of many people’s daily lives. Unfortunately, the high popularity of these platforms makes them very attractive to spammers. Machine-learning (ML) techniques have been widely used as a tool to address many cybersecurity application problems (such as spam and malware detection). However, most of the proposed approaches do not consider the presence of adversaries that target the defense mechanism itself. Adversaries can launch sophisticated attacks to undermine deployed spam detectors either during training or the prediction (test) phase. Not considering these adversarial activities at the design stage makes OSNs’ spam detectors prone to a range of adversarial attacks. This paper thus surveys the attacks against Twitter spam detectors in an adversarial environment. In addition, a general taxonomy of potential adversarial attacks is proposed by applying common frameworks from the literature. Examples of adversarial activities on Twitter were provided after observing Arabic trending hashtags. A new type of spam tweet (Adversarial spam tweet), which can be used to undermine deployed classifier, were found. In addition, possible countermeasures that could increase the robustness of Twitter spam detectors against such attacks are investigated.

Fuzzy based feature engineering architecture for sentiment analysis of medical discussion over online social networks

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
C S Pavan Kumar ◽  
L D Dhinesh Babu
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Membership Function ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Learning Model ◽  
Feature Engineering ◽  
Machine Learning Model ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Sentiment analysis is widely used to retrieve the hidden sentiments in medical discussions over Online Social Networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. People often tend to convey their feelings concerning their medical problems over social media platforms. Practitioners and health care workers have started to observe these discussions to assess the impact of health-related issues among the people. This helps in providing better care to improve the quality of life. Dementia is a serious disease in western countries like the United States of America and the United Kingdom, and the respective governments are providing facilities to the affected people. There is much chatter over social media platforms concerning the patients’ care, healthy measures to be followed to avoid disease, check early indications. These chatters have to be carefully monitored to help the officials take necessary precautions for the betterment of the affected. A novel Feature engineering architecture that involves feature-split for sentiment analysis of medical chatter over online social networks with the pipeline is proposed that can be used on any Machine Learning model. The proposed model used the fuzzy membership function in refining the outputs. The machine learning model has obtained sentiment score is subjected to fuzzification and defuzzification by using the trapezoid membership function and center of sums method, respectively. Three datasets are considered for comparison of the proposed and the regular model. The proposed approach delivered better results than the normal approach and is proved to be an effective approach for sentiment analysis of medical discussions over online social networks.

scholarly journals An Exploratory Study of COVID-19 Information on Twitter in the Greater Region

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Ninghan Chen ◽  
Zhiqiang Zhong ◽  
Jun Pang
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Representation Learning ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Learning Methods ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Over Time

The outbreak of the COVID-19 led to a burst of information in major online social networks (OSNs). Facing this constantly changing situation, OSNs have become an essential platform for people expressing opinions and seeking up-to-the-minute information. Thus, discussions on OSNs may become a reflection of reality. This paper aims to figure out how Twitter users in the Greater Region (GR) and related countries react differently over time through conducting a data-driven exploratory study of COVID-19 information using machine learning and representation learning methods. We find that tweet volume and COVID-19 cases in GR and related countries are correlated, but this correlation only exists in a particular period of the pandemic. Moreover, we plot the changing of topics in each country and region from 22 January 2020 to 5 June 2020, figuring out the main differences between GR and related countries.

scholarly journals Defining Inspection Techniques for Detecting Privacy Problems in Online Social Networks

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Andrey  Rodrigues ◽  
Natasha  M. C. Valentim ◽  
Eduardo  Feitosa
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Online Social Network ◽  
Effective Alternative ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Study Participants ◽  
Inspection Techniques

In the last few years, Online Social Networks (OSN) have experienced growth in the number of users, becoming an increasingly embedded part of people’s daily lives. Privacy expectations of OSNs are higher as more members start realizing potential privacy problems they face by interacting with these systems. Inspection methods can be an effective alternative for addressing privacy problems because they detect possible defects that could be causing the system to behave in an undesirable way. Therefore, we proposed a set of privacy inspection techniques called PIT-OSN (Privacy Inspection Techniques for Online Social Network). This paper presents the description and evolution of PIT-OSN through the results of a preliminary empirical study. We discuss the quantitative and qualitative results and their impact on improving the techniques. Results indicate that our techniques assist non-expert inspectors uncover privacy problems effectively, and are considered easy to use and useful by the study participants. Finally, the qualitative analysis helped us improve some technique steps that might be unclear.

Learning to Suggest Hashtags

2019 ◽  
pp. 302-325
Author(s):  
Fahd Kalloubi ◽  
El Habib Nfaoui
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Recommendation System ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Short Messages

Twitter is one of the primary online social networks where users share messages and contents of interest to those who follow their activities. To effectively categorize and give audience to their tweets, users try to append appropriate hashtags to their short messages. However, the hashtags usage is very small and very heterogeneous and users may spend a lot of time searching the appropriate hashtags. Thus, the need for a system to assist users in this task is very important to increase and homogenize the hashtagging usage. In this chapter, the authors present a hashtag recommendation system on microblogging platforms by leveraging semantic features. Furthermore, they conduct a detailed study on how the semantic-based model influences the final recommended hashtags using different ranking strategies. Moreover, they propose a linear and a machine learning based combination of these ranking strategies. The experiment results show that their approach improves content-based recommendations, achieving a recall of more than 47% on recommending 5 hashtags.

scholarly journals Exploring Adversarial Attacks and Defences for Fake Twitter Account Detection

Technologies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
Panagiotis Kantartopoulos ◽  
Nikolaos Pitropakis ◽  
Alexios Mylonas ◽  
Nicolas Kylilis
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Test Phase ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Specific Subject ◽  
Learning Techniques ◽  
Twitter Account

Social media has become very popular and important in people’s lives, as personal ideas, beliefs and opinions are expressed and shared through them. Unfortunately, social networks, and specifically Twitter, suffer from massive existence and perpetual creation of fake users. Their goal is to deceive other users employing various methods, or even create a stream of fake news and opinions in order to influence an idea upon a specific subject, thus impairing the platform’s integrity. As such, machine learning techniques have been widely used in social networks to address this type of threat by automatically identifying fake accounts. Nonetheless, threat actors update their arsenal and launch a range of sophisticated attacks to undermine this detection procedure, either during the training or test phase, rendering machine learning algorithms vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Our work examines the propagation of adversarial attacks in machine learning based detection for fake Twitter accounts, which is based on AdaBoost. Moreover, we propose and evaluate the use of k-NN as a countermeasure to remedy the effects of the adversarial attacks that we have implemented.

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