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Understanding compromised accounts on Twitter

Published: 23 August 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Social media has become a valuable tool for hackers to disseminate misinformation through compromised accounts. A compromised account is an account accessed by a third party without the user's knowledge. Previous studies have found 13% of online adults experienced their social media accounts compromised. Since compromised accounts can have a significant adverse impact on the social media sites, this has led to the growing research on detecting compromised accounts. However, previous works are limited as they either focus on the detection of hacked accounts for spamming and phishing activities or utilize only twitter content information. In this paper, we performed a systematic study on compromised accounts in Twitter by identifying who compromise the accounts; what information they share, and what patterns their tweets present. Our findings suggest that the accounts can be compromised by two different types of hackers and the content they post tend to follow several common themes. We also showed that, in addition to the text content of the tweets, there are other meta-information that can be exploited to help improve the detection of compromised accounts.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WI '17: Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Intelligence
August 2017
1284 pages
ISBN:9781450349512
DOI:10.1145/3106426
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 23 August 2017

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WI '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 118 of 178 submissions, 66%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 118 of 178 submissions, 66%

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  • (2024)AB-TCAD: An Access Behavior-Based Two-Stage Compromised Account Detection Framework2024 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking)10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619828(104-112)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2023)An Empirical Analysis of Incorrect Account Remediation in the Case of Broken AuthenticationIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.334341111(141610-141627)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2021)Investigating web service account remediation adviceProceedings of the Seventeenth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security10.5555/3563572.3563591(359-376)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2021
  • (2021)Detecting Compromised Social Network Accounts Using Deep Learning for Behavior and Text AnalysesInternational Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing10.4018/IJCAC.202104010611:2(1-13)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2021
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  • (2020)Semantic text analysis for detection of compromised accounts on social networksProceedings of the 12th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining10.1109/ASONAM49781.2020.9381432(417-424)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2020
  • (2020)UbCadet: detection of compromised accounts in twitter based on user behavioural profilingMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-020-08721-zOnline publication date: 21-Mar-2020
  • (2019)SOS: Save Our Social Network Accounts2019 IEEE 17th World Symposium on Applied Machine Intelligence and Informatics (SAMI)10.1109/SAMI.2019.8782731(43-48)Online publication date: Jan-2019
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