Strategies for Effective Shilling Attacks against Recommender Systems

Abstract

One area of research which has recently gained importance is the security of recommender systems. Malicious users may influence the recommender system by inserting biased data into the system. Such attacks may lead to erosion of user trust in the objectivity and accuracy of the system. In this paper, we propose a new approach for creating attack strategies. Our paper explores the importance of target item and filler items in mounting effective shilling attacks. Unlike previous approaches, we propose strategies built specifically for user based and item based collaborative filtering systems. Our attack strategies are based on intelligent selection of filler items. Filler items are selected on the basis of the target item rating distribution. We show through experiments that our strategies are effective against both user based and item based collaborative filtering systems. Our approach is shown to provide substantial improvement in attack effectiveness over existing attack models.