Related papers: Bot-Match: Social Bot Detection with Recursive Nea…
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,…
Bots are, for many Web and social media users, the source of many dangerous attacks or the carrier of unwanted messages, such as spam. Nevertheless, crawlers and software agents are a precious tool for analysts, and they are continuously…
Social bots have recently gained attention in the context of public opinion manipulation on social media platforms. While a lot of research effort has been put into the classification and detection of such (semi-)automated programs, it is…
The use of reinforcement learning to dynamically adapt and evade detection is now well-documented in several cybersecurity settings including Covert Social Influence Operations (CSIOs), in which bots try to spread disinformation. While AI…
This paper presents a study on the growing threat of "sleeper social bots," AI-driven social bots in the political landscape, created to spread disinformation and manipulate public opinion. We based the name sleeper social bots on their…
Social bots have become an important component of online social media. Deceptive bots, in particular, can manipulate online discussions of important issues ranging from elections to public health, threatening the constructive exchange of…
The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…
Amidst widespread reports of digital influence operations during major elections, policymakers, scholars, and journalists have become increasingly interested in the political impact of social media 'bots.' Most recently, platform companies…
Signature-based botnet detection methods identify botnets by recognizing Command and Control (C\&C) traffic and can be ineffective for botnets that use new and sophisticate mechanisms for such communications. To address these limitations,…
Twitter is one of the most popular social networks attracting millions of users, while a considerable proportion of online discourse is captured. It provides a simple usage framework with short messages and an efficient application…
The rapid and accurate identification of bot accounts in online social networks is an ongoing challenge. In this paper, we propose BOTTRINET, a unified embedding framework that leverages the textual content posted by accounts to detect…
A bot is a piece of software that is usually installed on an infected machine without the user's knowledge. A bot is controlled remotely by the attacker under a Command and Control structure. Recent statistics show that bots represent one…
Twitter bots are automatic programs operated by malicious actors to manipulate public opinion and spread misinformation. Research efforts have been made to automatically identify bots based on texts and networks on social media. Existing…
The presence of a large number of bots on social media leads to adverse effects. Although Random forest algorithm is widely used in bot detection and can significantly enhance the performance of weak classifiers, it cannot utilize the…
Adversarial Internet robots (botnets) represent a growing threat to the safe use and stability of the Internet. Botnets can play a role in launching adversary reconnaissance (scanning and phishing), influence operations (upvoting), and…
Language generation models' democratization benefits many domains, from answering health-related questions to enhancing education by providing AI-driven tutoring services. However, language generation models' democratization also makes it…
Within OSNs, many of our supposedly online friends may instead be fake accounts called social bots, part of large groups that purposely re-share targeted content. Here, we study retweeting behaviors on Twitter, with the ultimate goal of…
Nowadays, social media represent persuasive tools that have been progressively weaponized to affect people's beliefs, spread manipulative narratives, and sow conflicts along divergent factions. Software-controlled accounts (i.e., bots) are…
We first study the suitability of behavioral biometrics to distinguish between computers and humans, commonly named as bot detection. We then present BeCAPTCHA-Mouse, a bot detector based on: i) a neuromotor model of mouse dynamics to…
Large Language Model-driven (LLM-driven) social bots pose a growing threat to online discourse by generating human-like content that evades conventional detection. Existing methods suffer from limited detection accuracy due to overreliance…