Towards Detecting Compromised Accounts on Social Networks

Towards Detecting Compromised Accounts on Social Networks

Abstract— Towards Detecting Compromised Accounts on Social Networks. 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 < Final Year Projects 2016 > 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.