Uncover the Ghosts: Machine Learning based Spam Detection on Social Networks

Hao Yue
Associate Professor Dept of Computer Science, San Francisco State University

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

Cybercriminals have found in social networks (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) a propitious medium to launch massive cyber-attacks. Using compromised or fake accounts, criminals can exploit the inherent trust between connected users to effectively spread malicious content and perform scams against users. This talk will introduce two recent works on spam detection with machine learning: one leverages the differences in dissemination between benign and malicious messages and derive features from their dissemination paths among users and social communities to detect malicious messages, which is more effective under evasion tactics than traditional methods based on the content of messages or the behavior of user accounts. The other one adopts online learning to detect evasion tactics in time and self-adjust the machine learning models for detection.