Analysis of Blogs, Forums, and Social Networks

Abstract

It is impossible to imagine the contemporary Internet without social media. Government agents, commercial, state, and social organizations, the opposition, and other citizens use social media as a giant turbine. Unfortunately, this turbine can also be used to spread disinformation as well as hostile propaganda on a mass scale. In this article we show how vulnerable social media are to infiltration by botnets with the goal of launching information attacks.

Keywords:

• botnet
• information attack
• information system
• social media

Notes

1. Web platforms that provide the user with social activity. A social media user has an account that describes the user's social attributes, such as name, gender, interests, and contact information.

2. J.A. Vargas, “Obama Raised Half a Billion Online,” November 2008; available at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/11/obama-raised-half-a-billion-on.html.

3. F. Salem and R. Mourtada, “Civil Movements: The Impact of Facebook and Twitter,” Arab Social Media Report, 2001, 1(2).

4. D. Misener, “Rise of the Socialbots: They Could Be Influencing You Online,” March 2011; available at www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/03/29/f-vp-misener-socialbot-armies-election.html.

5. J. Ratkiewicz, M. Conover, M. Meiss, B. Gonçalves, S. Patil, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer, “Truthy: Mapping the Spread of Astroturf in Microblog Streams,” Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference Companion on the World Wide Web, WWW ’11, New York, 2011, pp. 249–52.

6. G. Stringhini, C. Kruegel, and G. Vigna, “Detecting Spammers on Social Networks,” in Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2010, New York, 2010, pp. 1–9.

7. T. Stein, E. Chen, and K. Mangla, “Facebook Immune System,” in Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Social Network Systems, SNS 2011, New York, 2011, p. 8:1(8:8).

8. Phishing is a kind of online fraud aimed at obtaining access to a user's confidential data, logins, and passwords.

Additional information

Funding

This work was carried out with the financial support of the Russian Ministry of Education and Science.