eprintid: 1470859 rev_number: 36 eprint_status: archive userid: 608 dir: disk0/01/47/08/59 datestamp: 2015-11-06 16:02:27 lastmod: 2021-09-26 22:10:44 status_changed: 2017-05-23 16:30:37 type: article metadata_visibility: show creators_name: Egele, M creators_name: Stringhini, G creators_name: Kruegel, C creators_name: Vigna, G title: Towards Detecting Compromised Accounts on Social Networks ispublished: pub divisions: UCL divisions: B04 divisions: C05 divisions: F48 keywords: Twitter, feature extraction, facebook, training, reliability, uniform resource locators note: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. © 2015 IEEE. abstract: Compromising social network accounts has become a profitable course of action for cybercriminals. By hijacking control of a popular media or business account, attackers can distribute their malicious messages or disseminate fake information to a large user base. The impacts of these incidents range from a tarnished reputation to multi-billion dollar monetary losses on financial markets. In our previous work, we demonstrated how we can detect large-scale compromises (i.e., so-called campaigns) of regular online social network users. In this work, we show how we can use similar techniques to identify compromises of individual high-profile accounts. High-profile accounts frequently have one characteristic that makes this detection reliable -- they show consistent behavior over time. We show that our system, were it deployed, would have been able to detect and prevent three real-world attacks against popular companies and news agencies. Furthermore, our system, in contrast to popular media, would not have fallen for a staged compromise instigated by a US restaurant chain for publicity reasons. date: 2017-07 official_url: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2015.2479616 oa_status: green full_text_type: other language: eng primo: open primo_central: open_green verified: verified_manual elements_id: 1051501 doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2015.2479616 lyricists_name: Stringhini, Gianluca lyricists_id: GSTRI63 actors_name: Stringhini, Gianluca actors_id: GSTRI63 actors_role: owner full_text_status: public publication: IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) volume: 14 number: 4 pagerange: 447-460 issn: 1545-5971 citation: Egele, M; Stringhini, G; Kruegel, C; Vigna, G; (2017) Towards Detecting Compromised Accounts on Social Networks. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) , 14 (4) pp. 447-460. 10.1109/TDSC.2015.2479616 <https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2015.2479616>. Green open access document_url: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1470859/1/thjp.pdf