SocialHEISTing: understanding stolen Facebook accounts
Files
Accepted manuscript
Date
2021-08-16
DOI
Authors
Onaolapo, Jeremiah
Leontiadis, Nektarios
Magka, Despoina
Stringhini, Gianluca
Version
Accepted manuscript
OA Version
Citation
J. Onaolapo, N. Leontiadis, D. Magka, G. Stringhini. 2021. "SocialHEISTing: Understanding Stolen Facebook Accounts." USENIX Security Symposium
Abstract
Online social network (OSN) accounts are often more usercentric
than other types of online accounts (e.g., email accounts)
because they present a number of demographic attributes
such as age, gender, location, and occupation. While
these attributes allow for more meaningful online interactions,
they can also be used by malicious parties to craft various
types of abuse. To understand the effects of demographic
attributes on attacker behavior in stolen social accounts, we
devised a method to instrument and monitor such accounts.
We then created, instrumented, and deployed more than 1000
Facebook accounts, and exposed them to criminals. Our results
confirm that victim demographic traits indeed influence
the way cybercriminals abuse their accounts. For example,
we find that cybercriminals that access teen accounts write
messages and posts more than the ones accessing adult accounts,
and attackers that compromise male accounts perform
disruptive activities such as changing some of their profile
information more than the ones that access female accounts.
This knowledge could potentially help online services develop
new models to characterize benign and malicious activity
across various demographic attributes, and thus automatically
classify future activity.
Description
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