The Underground Economy of Social Networks

An anonymous reader writes "In a new study, Barracuda Labs analyzed a random sampling of more than 70,000 fake Twitter accounts that are being used to sell fake Twitter followers. They also analyzed some of the people that are using such fake followers including the recent example of U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Twitter account. Between Facebook's 10-Q filing stating that 83 million of its accounts are fake, to Mitt Romney's Twitter account recently falling under scrutiny for suspicious followings, fake social network profiles are a hot topic at the moment. And these fake profiles are at the center of a very vibrant and growing underground economy. This underground economy consists of dealers who create and sell the use of thousands of fake social accounts, and abusers who buy follows or likes from these fake accounts to boost their perceived popularity, sell advertising based on their now large social audience or conduct other malicious activity."

Comments

Shills aren't new

[i kan reed]

Bulk shills are. Welcome to the future, where the difference between a valid viewpoint and an astroturfed attempt to hornswaggle you out of your own money and political power has shrunk to the imperceptible.

well that settles it

[Trepidity]

Whereas I previously liked all of Mitt Romney's policies and was going to vote for me, this shocking revelation that his Twitter follower count might be manipulated is just too much for me to swallow, so he loses my vote!

I would have phrased it differently.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I would have phrased this differently:

This underground economy consists of dealers who create and sell the use of thousands of fake social accounts, and abusers who buy follows or likes from these fake accounts to boost their perceived popularity, sell advertising based on their now large social audience or conduct other malicious activity."

We could probably go with something like this:

This underground economy consists of dealers who create and sell the use of thousands of fake social accounts, and suckers who buy follows or likes from these fake accounts to boost their perceived popularity while under the misguided impression that these numbers convince people to purchase their product

One "like" from a "friend" is worth a hundred thousand likes from random strangers (even if they're real people). And one detailed comment about a product from an actual trusted friend is worth more than a hundred thousand likes from friends.

Re:I would have phrased it differently.

[iluvcapra]

One "like" from a "friend" is worth a hundred thousand likes from random strangers (even if they're real people). And one detailed comment about a product from an actual trusted friend is worth more than a hundred thousand likes from friends.

That was supposed to be the whole point of Facebook. It's easy to "like" anything, but having a relationship graph gives you the context necessary to decide who the hell is "liking" something in the first place, and what that means. It all starts to break down when people friend anyone will-nilly, or sell their friendship to bots.

The problem is that friendship on Facebook (or Google Plus, for that matter) is an exhaustible resource. They'd probably kill fake accounts dead if they rationed the number of friends you're allowed to make, and only allowed people to create new accounts on the basis of several invitations and community rating -- essentially a proper web of trust.

Of course the whole business model for these sorts of sites is to bilk advertisers with clickfraud, and bots with phony accounts are a great way of doing that, so the goal isn't to eliminate phony accounts or friend relations, but to find the perfect balance of just enough humans to make the ads profitable, and advertisers feel like they're actually hitting an eyeball every now and then.

Re:I wonder ..

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Please, please, we prefer the term "heuristically assisted accountholders" and would like to assure all Facebook shareholders who aren't currently insider trading that they are based on the highest quality statistical inferences from our actual userbase for the greatest plausibility to the clickfraud bots that drive our advertising arm.

Re:I wonder ..

[dc29A]

That statement assumes that the average user^H^H^H^H^product of Facebook cares about privacy.

The actual problem

[Ryanrule]

is advertising. It needs to be pretty much removed from modern life. Attracts the slimiest motherfuckers.

We reported this last year; Barracuda missed much.

[Animats]

Our paper from November 2011, "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social", covered this last year.

Barracuda Networks doesn't even seem to have published a paper. (The article linked in the Slashdot article is a scraper site for press releases.) The Barracuda press release points to an "infographic" and a blog posting which, as their only outside source, links to a black hat site.

Barracuda doesn't seem to have discovered the extent of the social spamming ecosystem. We identified at least 6 levels:

• Advertising agencies.
• SEO firms. ("Google Places Guaranteed")
• Fake review, "like", "+1", and "retweet" generators. ("Buy Facebook Fans with us today and watch your popularity boom.")
• Fake account generators, both automated and outsourced to low-wage countries. ("Bulk Accounts is the largest mass account generator out there. ...Gmail, Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail and much more...")
• Fake IP address proxies and fake phone numbers ("Premium Private Proxies", "Top Quality CL Phone Numbers used to create Craigslist PVAs")
• Botnet operators providing proxies on compromised machines. Now we're down at the organized crime level.

This structure insulates the legitimate businesses who use ad agencies from the criminal activity at the bottom. Except for the botnet operators, everybody in that ecosystem has some kind of web presence, although towards the bottom, they usually have only Skype and Gmail accounts as contacts. I'm not going to link to them here, but our paper gives actual names.