Twitter AnomalyDetection tool goes open source

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-anomalydetection-tool-goes-open-source/

By Charlie Osborne
Zero Day
ZDNet News
January 7, 2015

Twitter has opened up suspicious activity tracker AnomalyDetection to 
developers.

The social media giant said on Tuesday the tool, dubbed AnomalyDetection, 
is used by the firm's team to detect unusual traffic events including 
traffic spikes and surges, as well as the presence of spam bots. In the 
world of Big Data, such spikes on a company's networks can negatively 
impact service by flooding Internet lanes, causing denial-of-service 
problems and website crashes, as well as irritating users on an individual 
level -- if spam levels are not kept under control, for example.

AnomalyDetection, an open-source R package which automatically detects 
anomalies, is used by Twitter to scan for spikes in traffic. While traffic 
surges can be legitimate and the result of events such as Christmas Eve 
and New Year's Day -- as well as breaking news events or viral stories -- 
the tool can also find bots, spammers and problems in system metrics.

"We're open-sourcing AnomalyDetection because we'd like the public 
community to evolve the package and learn from it as we have," Twitter 
says.

[...]



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