Towards Detecting Compromised Accounts on Social Networks
Abstract
Compromising social network accounts has become a profitable course of action for cybercriminals. By hijacking control of a popular media or business account, attackers can distribute their malicious messages or disseminate fake information to a large user base. The impacts of these incidents range from a tarnished reputation to multi-billion dollar monetary losses on financial markets. In our previous work, we demonstrated how we can detect large-scale compromises (i.e., so-called campaigns) of regular online social network users. In this work, we show how we can use similar techniques to identify compromises of individual high-profile accounts. High-profile accounts frequently have one characteristic that makes this detection reliable -- they show consistent behavior over time. We show that our system, were it deployed, would have been able to detect and prevent three real-world attacks against popular companies and news agencies. Furthermore, our system, in contrast to popular media, would not have fallen for a staged compromise instigated by a US restaurant chain for publicity reasons.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1509.03531,
title = {Towards Detecting Compromised Accounts on Social Networks},
author = {Manuel Egele and Gianluca Stringhini and Christopher Kruegel and Giovanni Vigna},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.03531},
year = {2015}
}