11,798 research outputs found
Cashtag piggybacking: uncovering spam and bot activity in stock microblogs on Twitter
Microblogs are increasingly exploited for predicting prices and traded
volumes of stocks in financial markets. However, it has been demonstrated that
much of the content shared in microblogging platforms is created and publicized
by bots and spammers. Yet, the presence (or lack thereof) and the impact of
fake stock microblogs has never systematically been investigated before. Here,
we study 9M tweets related to stocks of the 5 main financial markets in the US.
By comparing tweets with financial data from Google Finance, we highlight
important characteristics of Twitter stock microblogs. More importantly, we
uncover a malicious practice - referred to as cashtag piggybacking -
perpetrated by coordinated groups of bots and likely aimed at promoting
low-value stocks by exploiting the popularity of high-value ones. Among the
findings of our study is that as much as 71% of the authors of suspicious
financial tweets are classified as bots by a state-of-the-art spambot detection
algorithm. Furthermore, 37% of them were suspended by Twitter a few months
after our investigation. Our results call for the adoption of spam and bot
detection techniques in all studies and applications that exploit
user-generated content for predicting the stock market
Emerging Phishing Trends and Effectiveness of the Anti-Phishing Landing Page
Each month, more attacks are launched with the aim of making web users
believe that they are communicating with a trusted entity which compels them to
share their personal, financial information. Phishing costs Internet users
billions of dollars every year. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
created an anti-phishing landing page supported by Anti-Phishing Working Group
(APWG) with the aim to train users on how to prevent themselves from phishing
attacks. It is used by financial institutions, phish site take down vendors,
government organizations, and online merchants. When a potential victim clicks
on a phishing link that has been taken down, he / she is redirected to the
landing page. In this paper, we present the comparative analysis on two
datasets that we obtained from APWG's landing page log files; one, from
September 7, 2008 - November 11, 2009, and other from January 1, 2014 - April
30, 2014. We found that the landing page has been successful in training users
against phishing. Forty six percent users clicked lesser number of phishing
URLs from January 2014 to April 2014 which shows that training from the landing
page helped users not to fall for phishing attacks. Our analysis shows that
phishers have started to modify their techniques by creating more legitimate
looking URLs and buying large number of domains to increase their activity. We
observed that phishers are exploiting ICANN accredited registrars to launch
their attacks even after strict surveillance. We saw that phishers are trying
to exploit free subdomain registration services to carry out attacks. In this
paper, we also compared the phishing e-mails used by phishers to lure victims
in 2008 and 2014. We found that the phishing e-mails have changed considerably
over time. Phishers have adopted new techniques like sending promotional
e-mails and emotionally targeting users in clicking phishing URLs
The role of information systems in the prevention and detection of transnational and international crime
© Cambridge University Press 2014. All around the world criminal activity remains at the forefront of governmental concerns, not only as a problem that distorts the very fabric of society within the confines of national jurisdictions, but also as a problem that cuts across national borders to exhibit a global dimension. The international dimension of criminal activity remains critical and is generally characterized by a complexity that is unique and requires action on many different levels. Criminals set out to mask their illegal activities and deliberately generate complexity as a means of concealment. In doing so, they exploit new developments in technology that assist them in achieving their ends. This criminality exhibits forms of innovation that stretch far beyond traditional criminal activity (e.g., drug and human trafficking) and manages to attach itself within the broader fabric of society by exploiting the very latest developments. This evolution is necessary as criminals seek not only to escape arrest, prosecution and conviction, but also to enjoy the fruits of their criminality (mostly financial gains). Thus, they seek to develop ways of exploiting the various diffuse norms of social interaction (e.g., trust), financial modes of conduct (e.g., cash-based economies), technological and communication developments (e.g., Internet), and thereby minimize the possibility for detection. By limiting the resources that can be made available for prevention (or making them obsolete when developing new criminal behaviour), they participate in this co-evolution actively; and this they achieve by generating complexity
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