Related papers: BotHawk: An Approach for Bots Detection in Open So…
Botnets are becoming increasingly prevalent as the primary enabling technology in a variety of malicious campaigns such as email spam, click fraud, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and cryptocurrency mining. Botnet technology…
Bots, simply defined as accounts controlled by automation, can be used as a weapon for online manipulation and pose a threat to the health of platforms. Researchers have studied online platforms to detect, estimate, and characterize bot…
Bots, social media accounts controlled by software rather than by humans, have recently been under the spotlight for their association with various forms of online manipulation. To date, much work has focused on social bot detection, but…
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,…
A very large number of people use Online Social Networks daily. Such platforms thus become attractive targets for agents that seek to gain access to the attention of large audiences, and influence perceptions or opinions. Botnets,…
End users positive response is essential for the success of any software. This is true for both commercial and Open Source Software (OSS). OSS is popular not only because of its availability, which is usually free but due to the user…
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…
We study how bots contribute to open-source discussions in the Ethereum ecosystem and whether they influence developers' emotional tone. Our dataset covers 36,875 accounts across ten repositories with 105 validated bots (0.28%). Human…
Automated bots now account for roughly half of all web requests, and an increasing number deliberately spoof their identity to either evade detection or to not respect robots.txt. Existing countermeasures are either resource-intensive…
Recent research has shown a substantial active presence of bots in online social networks (OSNs). In this paper we utilise our past work on studying bots (Stweeler) to comparatively analyse the usage and impact of bots and humans on…
Botnets are considered one of the most dangerous and serious security threats facing the networks and the Internet. Comparing with the other security threats, botnet members have the ability to be directed and controlled via C&C messages…
Open source software (OSS) development relies on diverse skill sets. However, to our knowledge, there are no tools which detect OSS-related skills. In this paper, we present a novel method to detect OSS skills and prototype it in a tool…
While social media are a key source of data for computational social science, their ease of manipulation by malicious actors threatens the integrity of online information exchanges and their analysis. In this Chapter, we focus on malicious…
Software bots have attracted increasing interest and popularity in both research and society. Their contributions span automation, digital twins, game characters with conscious-like behavior, and social media. However, there is still a lack…
Background: Open source software has an increasing importance in modern software development. However, there is also a growing concern on the sustainability of such projects, which are usually managed by a small number of developers,…
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…
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…
Social Media are evolving as a pervasive source of news able to reach a larger audience through their spreading power. The main drawback is given by the presence of malicious accounts, known as social bots, which are often used to diffuse…
Software security incidents occur everyday and thousands of software security reports are announced each month. Thus, it is difficult for software security researchers, engineers, and other stakeholders to follow software security topics of…
To foster collaboration and inclusivity in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, it is crucial to understand and detect patterns of toxic language that may drive contributors away, especially those from underrepresented communities. Although…