Twitter Spamdetector Service
Tuesday, March 16. 2010
At the International Secure Systems Lab, we have developed a couple of services like Anubis, Wepawet, or FIRE. Lately, we have worked on a mechanism to detect spammers on Twitter, a popular microblogging service. We have developed several heuristics to detect spamming profiles, and have already reported thousands of these profiles to Twitter, who then shut down these profiles. Now we have created a profile to which users can flag spammers on Twitter: the flagged accounts are added to our database, allowing us to detect profiles from campaigns we did not observe before.
The profile is @spamdetector, and the messages it accepts are of the format
Whenever you see a suspicious account, you can simply send us a notification and our system will check if this account is likely a spammer or not. This helps us to improve our heuristics, and we can help Twitter to shut down suspicious profiles, leading to a better service.
This work was carried out by Gianluca Stringhini, a PhD student at University of California, Santa Barbara, working as research assistant at the Computer Security lab. And you can find my tweets at @thorstenholz.
The profile is @spamdetector, and the messages it accepts are of the format
"@spamdetector @spamaccount"
Whenever you see a suspicious account, you can simply send us a notification and our system will check if this account is likely a spammer or not. This helps us to improve our heuristics, and we can help Twitter to shut down suspicious profiles, leading to a better service.
This work was carried out by Gianluca Stringhini, a PhD student at University of California, Santa Barbara, working as research assistant at the Computer Security lab. And you can find my tweets at @thorstenholz.
