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Online video-on-demand(VoD) services invariably maintain a view count for each video they serve, and it has become an important currency for various stakeholders, from viewers, to content owners, advertizers, and the online service…
As Internet streaming of live content has gained on traditional cable TV viewership, we have also seen significant growth of free live streaming services which illegally provide free access to copyrighted content over the Internet. Some of…
How can we detect suspicious users in large online networks? Online popularity of a user or product (via follows, page-likes, etc.) can be monetized on the premise of higher ad click-through rates or increased sales. Web services and social…
The advances in the digital era have led to rapid dissemination of information. This has also aggravated the spread of misinformation and disinformation. This has potentially serious consequences, such as civil unrest. While fact-checking…
We study a model of subscription-based platforms where users pay a fixed fee for unlimited access to content, and creators receive a share of the revenue. Existing approaches to detecting fraud predominantly rely on machine learning…
While substantial effort has been devoted to understand fraudulent activity in traditional online advertising (search and banner), more recent forms such as video ads have received little attention. The understanding and identification of…
We uncover a previously unknown, ongoing astroturfing attack on the popularity mechanisms of social media platforms: ephemeral astroturfing attacks. In this attack, a chosen keyword or topic is artificially promoted by coordinated and…
Deepfake has taken the world by storm, triggering a trust crisis. Current deepfake detection methods are typically inadequate in generalizability, with a tendency to overfit to image contents such as the background, which are frequently…
We develop a comprehensive theoretical framework to analyze live streaming platforms as two-sided markets, focusing on the head effect where a small subset of elite streamers disproportionately attracts viewer attention. By constructing…
As human computation on crowdsourcing systems has become popular and powerful for performing tasks, malicious users have started misusing these systems by posting malicious tasks, propagating manipulated contents, and targeting popular web…
Advertising is a primary means for revenue generation for millions of websites and smartphone apps (publishers). Naturally, a fraction of publishers abuse the ad-network to systematically defraud advertisers of their money. Defenses have…
Illegal live-streaming identification, which aims to help live-streaming platforms immediately recognize the illegal behaviors in the live-streaming, such as selling precious and endangered animals, plays a crucial role in purifying the…
Live video streaming is increasingly popular on social media platforms. With the growth of live streaming comes an increased need for robust content moderation to remove dangerous, illegal, or otherwise objectionable content. Whereas video…
Twitter bots amplify target content in a coordinated manner to make them appear popular, which is an astroturfing attack. Such attacks promote certain keywords to push them to Twitter trends to make them visible to a broader audience. Past…
This paper presents a novel algorithm for peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming that addresses the limitations of single-layer systems through a multi-layered approach. The proposed solution adapts to diverse user capabilities and bandwidth…
Telegram is one of the most used instant messaging apps worldwide. Some of its success lies in providing high privacy protection and social network features like the channels -- virtual rooms in which only the admins can post and broadcast…
Bots constitute a significant portion of Internet traffic and are a source of various issues across multiple domains. Modern bots often become indistinguishable from real users, as they employ similar methods to browse the web, including…
Facial Liveness Verification (FLV) is widely used for identity authentication in many security-sensitive domains and offered as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) by leading cloud vendors. Yet, with the rapid advances in synthetic media…
Social media platforms have led to online consumption communities, or fandoms, that involve complex networks of ancillary creators and consumers focused on some core product or intellectual property. For example, video game communities…
In this paper we conduct a large scale measurement study in order to analyse the fake content publishing phenomenon in the BitTorrent Ecosystem. Our results reveal that fake content represents an important portion (35%) of those files…