Social Spam — Online Social Networks are popular collaboration tools for millions of users and their friends. Unfortunately, they also become effective tools for executing spam campaigns and spreading malware. Intuitively, a user is more likely to respond to a message from a friend than from a stranger; thus, social spamming is a more effective distribution mechanism than traditional email. Study a large dataset composed of over 187 million wall messages among 200,000 malicious wall posts with embedded URLs originating from more than 57,000 accounts. It is shown that more than 70 percent of all malicious wall posts advertise phishing sites. It is also found that more than 97 percent are compromised accounts rather than “fake” accounts created solely for the purpose of spamming. Finally, spamming dominates actual wall post activity in the early morning hours, when normal users are asleep.
Lumezanu et al. [18] perform a joint analysis of spam in email and social networks. Spam data from Yahoo’s web-based email service and Twitter are used to characterize the publishing behavior and effectiveness of spam advertised across both platforms. It is shown that email spammers that also advertise on Twitter tend to send more email spam than those advertising exclusively through email. Furthermore, sending spam on both email and Twitter has better exposure than spamming exclusively with email: spam domains appearing on both platforms are looked up by an order of magnitude more networks than domains using just one platform.