Researchers explore underground market of Twitter spam and abuse

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.csoonline.com/article/738100/researchers-explore-underground-market-of-twitter-spam-and-abuse

By Steve Ragan
Staff Writer
CSO Online
August 14, 2013

Researchers presented data from an ICSI (International Computer Science 
Institute) driven project Wednesday at the 22nd USENIX Security Symposium 
in Washington, D.C., that explores the underground market of spam and 
abuse on Twitter.

Led by Vern Paxson of International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and 
Chris Grier of UC Berkeley, the group tracked the criminal market on 
Twitter, which sells access to accounts that are later used to push spam, 
malicious links (including Phishing and malware), as well as inflate 
follower counts. Research participants from George Mason University and 
Twitter also took part.

Their research took ten months, and during that time they examined 27 
merchants responsible for several million fraudulent accounts. Of those, 
95 percent of them were taken offline after the researchers reported them 
to Twitter. However, the paper says that these merchants were responsible 
for nearly 10-20 percent of all the illegitimate accounts created on the 
service during the monitoring period, and that the criminals controlling 
these market places earned $127,000 to $159,000 for their efforts.

The study was limited to Twitter, only because the researchers couldn't 
obtain permission from other social networks, such as Facebook, Google, 
and Yahoo -- each of which the researchers observed being actively abused 
by the merchants peddling accounts. As part of their service offerings, 
the merchants observed during the study promise such things as spam 
hosting, CAPTCHA solving, PPI (Pay-Per-Install) programs, and exploit 
kits.

[...]



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