Efficient and Scalable Socware Detection in Online Social Networks

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become the new vector for cybercrime, and hackers are finding new ways to propagate spam and malware on these platforms, which the authors refer to as socware. As they show here, socware cannot be identified with existing security mechanisms (e.g., URL blacklists), because it exploits different weaknesses and often has different intentions. In this paper, they present MyPageKeeper, a Facebook application that they have developed to protect Facebook users from socware. Here, they present results from the perspective of over 12K users who have installed MyPageKeeper and their roughly 2.4 million friends.