Adapting Social Spam Infrastructure for Political Censorship

RESEARCH PAPER 1
Kurt Thomas, Chris Grier, and Vern Paxson
Abstract-A social network is an effective tool for dissent,
computing services and political engagement which has
become regular targets of censorship. In the last few
years, nation-states exerted their control over the
internet to block unwanted links and signals from the
system. A striking example of social networks and
manipulation occurred on twitter when the hackers
collected the data of 25,860 users and performed
malicious related activities. The purpose of this
investigation is to describe the social spam
infrastructure used for political censorship. It is
observed that spam is a common security breach which
is growing very fast and many business communities
are facing this problem in the workplace. In this paper,
the author undertakes an in-depth evaluation of the
spam infrastructure and accounts which facilitated the
cyber-attacks. Moreover, the authors highlighted how
twitter’s relevance based process supported consumers
to reduce the impact of spam and other security issues.
Keywords- social network, Twitter, cyber-attack, spam
and spam infrastructure
INTRODUCTION
In the last few years, the use of social networks has
increased quickly and it is a very effective technique
from the perspective of dissent and political
discussion. There are numerous types of social
networks used in this generation, for example,
Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and so on in order to
interconnect U.S. government with the citizen for
driving consumer’s discourse. It is observed that the
government of the U.K. developed and implement
various strategies for reducing the issue of cyber-
attacks and also ban hackers and other consumers
from social networks [1]. In this research, the author
provides complete information about social spams
and also identify how unknown or third patties
control the political conversations. Moreover, the
researchers determine the accounts and infrastructure
used by hackers for performing hacking-related
processes. The previous investigations identified the
key factors that increase the rate of spam and data
breach but the current research provides in-depth
analysis about the spam infrastructure and networks.
It is observed that attack faced by Twitter involved
around 25,860 fraud accounts used by the hackers for
obtaining data of consumers. In which criminals
performed spam related activities and also transferred
the fraud signals to the networks used by Twitter and
injects 440,793 tweets related to the election. It is
observed that these accounts originated from a pool
of 975,283 accounts and helped the criminals and
third parties for obtaining information related to the
elections [2]. In this paper, the authors explore the
infrastructure system need to reduce such kinds of
cyber-attacks from the system and improve the
security of personal information.
BACKGROUND
In this part, the author evaluates how criminals can
attempt to censor Twitter with the help of fraud
accounts and spams. It is observed that most of the
hackers use the underground markets along with the
malicious system in order to collect the data of
consumers and perform hacking related activities.
The hashtag has emerged on Twitter which is used to
organize communication around the topic and
consumers use such kind of threats to make the
conversation more effective [3]. Because of Hashtags
conversations are susceptible to a particular cyber-
crime and it helps hackers for obtaining the data of
consumers. In the case of cyber-attacks automated
Sybil, accounts increase the rate of conflicts and help
criminals to perform attacks in an effective manner. It
is very complex for consumers to detect the fraud
signals and Sybil accounts from the system due to
which users may lose their personal information and
messages [4]. These strategies involve, analyzing the
social graphs, using backup plans, characterizing the
arrival tome and distribution of the tasks and
recognizing spam and unwanted signals from the
system. For this research, the author relies on
Twitter’s spam and fraud accounts in order to control
and manage cyber-crimes from the system.
METHODOLOGY
Before evaluating and exploring the cyber-attacks the
author describes developed techniques in order to
determine automated accounts which posted
information related to the Russian election in the year
Adapting Social Spam Infrastructure for
Political Censorship