Related papers: BotHawk: An Approach for Bots Detection in Open So…

An essential topic in online social network security is how to accurately detect bot accounts and relieve their harmful impacts (e.g., misinformation, rumor, and spam) on genuine users. Based on a real-world data set, we construct…

Background: Some developer activity traditionally performed manually, such as making code commits, opening, managing, or closing issues is increasingly subject to automation in many OSS projects. Specifically, such activity is often…

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are a cornerstone in modern society, serving as platforms for diverse content consumption by millions of users each day. However, the challenge of ensuring the accuracy of information shared on these platforms…

The development of Open-Source Software (OSS) projects relies on the collaborative work of contributors, generally scattered around the world. To enable this collaboration, OSS projects are hosted on social-coding platforms like GitHub,…

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…

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…

For more than a decade now, academicians and online platform administrators have been studying solutions to the problem of bot detection. Bots are computer algorithms whose use is far from being benign: malicious bots are purposely created…

Contemporary social coding platforms such as GitHub facilitate collaborative distributed software development. Developers engaged in these platforms often use machine accounts (bots) for automating effort-intensive or repetitive activities.…

Software bots, extensively adopted by Open Source Software (OSS) projects, support developers across several activities, from automating predefined tasks to generating code that aids software engineers. However, with the growing prominence…

The importance of social media in our daily lives has unfortunately led to an increase in the spread of misinformation, political messages and malicious links. One of the most popular ways of carrying out those activities is using automated…

Bots are frequently used in Github repositories to automate repetitive activities that are part of the distributed software development process. They communicate with human actors through comments. While detecting their presence is…

Increasing evidence suggests that a growing amount of social media content is generated by autonomous entities known as social bots. In this work we present a framework to detect such entities on Twitter. We leverage more than a thousand…

Online Social Networks have revolutionized how we consume and share information, but they have also led to a proliferation of content not always reliable and accurate. One particular type of social accounts is known to promote unreputable…

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…

Background: Despite a growing body of literature on the impact of software bots on open source software development teams, their effects on team communication, coordination, and collaboration practices are not well understood. Bots can have…

Software bots are used to streamline tasks in Open Source Software (OSS) projects' pull requests, saving development cost, time, and effort. However, their presence can be disruptive to the community. We identified several challenges caused…

Contemporary social coding platforms like GitHub promote collaborative development. Many open-source software repositories hosted in these platforms use machine accounts (bots) to automate and facilitate a wide range of effort-intensive and…

Escalating proliferation of inorganic accounts, commonly known as bots, within the digital ecosystem represents an ongoing and multifaceted challenge to online security, trustworthiness, and user experience. These bots, often employed for…

Given the rapid growth of Open-Source Software (OSS) projects, ethical considerations are becoming more important. Past studies focused on specific ethical issues (e.g., gender bias and fairness in OSS). There is little to no study on the…

Botnets, which consist of thousands of compromised machines, can cause significant threats to other systems by launching Distributed Denial of Service (SSoS) attacks, keylogging, and backdoors. In response to these threats, new effective…