View article

An online social network (OSN) is a social structure made up of a set of users that are interested to communicate with each other in an online environment in order to share information. Social networking services (SNSs) are web-based platforms for building OSNs. SNSs are increasingly threatened by social bots that are fake or compromised user accounts with malicious intent, which mimic the behavior of legitimate users to evade detection. A social botnet refers to a group of social bots under the control of a single botmaster, which collaborate to conduct the same malicious activities. Using social botnets, spammers are now able to flood news and political websites with tens of thousands of comments. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in designing advanced techniques to automatically detect social botnets in an SNS. The techniques often rely on either examining the structure of the underlying …