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Phishing attacks are an increasingly potent web-based threat, with nearly 1.5 million websites created on a monthly basis. In this work, we present the first study towards identifying such attacks through phishing reports shared by users on…
With the advent of online social media, phishers have started using social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare to spread phishing scams. Twitter is an immensely popular micro-blogging network where people post short messages of…
A series of bots performing simulated social engineering attacks using phishing in the Twitter platform was developed to identify potentially unsafe user behavior. In this work different bot versions were developed to collect feedback data…
URLs are central to a myriad of cyber-security threats, from phishing to the distribution of malware. Their inherent ease of use and familiarity is continuously abused by attackers to evade defences and deceive end-users. Seemingly…
In recent years, Twitter has seen a proliferation of automated accounts or bots that send spam, offer clickbait, compromise security using malware, and attempt to skew public opinion. Previous research estimates that around 9% to 17% of…
Data extracted from social networks like Twitter are increasingly being used to build applications and services that mine and summarize public reactions to events, such as traffic monitoring platforms, identification of epidemic outbreaks,…
The rise in phishing attacks via e-mail and short message service (SMS) has not slowed down at all. The first thing we need to do to combat the ever-increasing number of phishing attacks is to collect and characterize more phishing cases…
Existence of spam URLs over emails and Online Social Media (OSM) has become a massive e-crime. To counter the dissemination of long complex URLs in emails and character limit imposed on various OSM (like Twitter), the concept of URL…
Research into influence campaigns on Twitter has mostly relied on identifying malicious activities from tweets obtained via public APIs. These APIs provide access to public tweets that have not been deleted. However, bad actors can delete…
Toxicity is endemic to online social networks including Twitter. It follows a Pareto like distribution where most of the toxicity is generated by a very small number of profiles and as such, analyzing and characterizing these toxic profiles…
During sudden onset crisis events, the presence of spam, rumors and fake content on Twitter reduces the value of information contained on its messages (or "tweets"). A possible solution to this problem is to use machine learning to…
In the pursuit of bolstering user safety, social media platforms deploy active moderation strategies, including content removal and user suspension. These measures target users engaged in discussions marked by hate speech or toxicity, often…
The popularity of Twitter for information discovery, coupled with the automatic shortening of URLs to save space, given the 140 character limit, provides cyber criminals with an opportunity to obfuscate the URL of a malicious Web page…
Free Website Building services (FWBs) provide individuals with a cost-effective and convenient way to create a website without requiring advanced technical knowledge or coding skills. However, malicious actors often abuse these services to…
The micro-blogging platform Twitter allows its nearly 320 million monthly active users to build a network of follower connections to other Twitter users (i.e., followees) in order to subscribe to content posted by these users. With this…
Phishing continues to pose a significant cybersecurity threat. While blocklists currently serve as a primary defense, due to their reactive, passive nature, these delayed responses leave phishing websites operational long enough to harm…
Existence of spam URLs over emails and Online Social Media (OSM) has become a growing phenomenon. To counter the dissemination issues associated with long complex URLs in emails and character limit imposed on various OSM (like Twitter), the…
In this study, we reveal, for the first time, popular online social networks (especially Twitter) are being extensively abused by miscreants to promote illicit goods and services of diverse categories. This study is made possible by…
Over 500 million tweets are posted in Twitter each day, out of which about 11% tweets are deleted by the users posting them. This phenomenon of widespread deletion of tweets leads to a number of questions: what kind of content posted by…
Blacklists are a widely-used Internet security mechanism to protect Internet users from financial scams, malicious web pages and other cyber attacks based on blacklisted URLs. In this demo, we introduce PhishChain, a transparent and…