research-article

The socio-monetary incentives of online social network malware campaigns

Authors:

Ting-Kai Huang,

Harsha V. Madhyastha,

Michalis FaloutsosAuthors Info & Claims

COSN '14: Proceedings of the second ACM conference on Online social networks

Pages 259 - 270

https://doi.org/10.1145/2660460.2660478

Published: 01 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Online social networks (OSNs) offer a rich medium of malware propagation. Unlike other forms of malware, OSN malware campaigns direct users to malicious websites that hijack their accounts, posting malicious messages on their behalf with the intent of luring their friends to the malicious website, thus triggering word-of-mouth infections that cascade through the network compromising thousands of accounts. But how are OSN users lured to click on the malicious links? In this work, we monitor 3.5 million Facebook accounts and explore the role of pure monetary, social, and combined socio-monetary psychological incentives in OSN malware campaigns. Among other findings we see that the majority of the malware campaigns rely on pure social incentives. However, we also observe that malware campaigns using socio-monetary incentives infect more accounts and last longer than campaigns with pure monetary or social incentives. The latter suggests the efficiency of an epidemic tactic surprisingly similar to the mechanism used by biological pathogens to cope with diverse gene pools.

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Cited By

Arzani BCiraci SSaroiu SWolman AStokes JOuthred GDiwu LBhagwan RPorter G(2020)PrivateEyeProceedings of the 17th Usenix Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3388242.3388300(797-816)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3388242.3388300
Garcia DAbisheva ASchweitzer F(2017)Evaluative Patterns and Incentives in YouTubeSocial Informatics10.1007/978-3-319-67256-4_24(301-315)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67256-4_24
Ribeiro BHoang MSingh AGangemi ALeonardi SPanconesi A(2015)Beyond ModelsProceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web10.1145/2736277.2741677(885-895)Online publication date: 18-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2736277.2741677
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

The socio-monetary incentives of online social network malware campaigns
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

COSN '14: Proceedings of the second ACM conference on Online social networks

October 2014

288 pages

ISBN:9781450331982

DOI:10.1145/2660460

General Chair:
Alessandra Sala
Bell Laboratories, Ireland
,
Program Chairs:
Ashish Goel
Stanford / Twitter, USA
,
Krishna Gummadi
MPI-SWS, Germany

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 October 2014

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COSN'14: Conference on Online Social Networks

October 1 - 2, 2014

Dublin, Ireland

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COSN '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 25 of 87 submissions, 29%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 307 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

Arzani BCiraci SSaroiu SWolman AStokes JOuthred GDiwu LBhagwan RPorter G(2020)PrivateEyeProceedings of the 17th Usenix Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3388242.3388300(797-816)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3388242.3388300
Garcia DAbisheva ASchweitzer F(2017)Evaluative Patterns and Incentives in YouTubeSocial Informatics10.1007/978-3-319-67256-4_24(301-315)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67256-4_24
Ribeiro BHoang MSingh AGangemi ALeonardi SPanconesi A(2015)Beyond ModelsProceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web10.1145/2736277.2741677(885-895)Online publication date: 18-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2736277.2741677
Scekic O(2015)Incentive Mechanisms for Social ComputingProceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems Workshops10.1109/SASOW.2015.32(162-167)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/SASOW.2015.32
Marinescu IKlein NChamberlain ASmart M(undefined)Incentives Can Reduce Bias in Online ReviewsSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.3092828
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3092828

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