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SocialBot: Behavioral Analysis and Detection

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Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 625))

Abstract

Bots refer to automated software that have the capability to execute commands on receiving instructions from BotMaster. SocialBots are the bots present in Online Social Network (OSN) which mimic the activities of the real users. They have the capability to automatically perform the basic functionalities offered by the OSN platforms. These socialbots have widespread usage in political campaigning and product marketing, but SocialBots can also been used for the purpose of swaying voters, mounting political attacks, manipulating public opinion, etc. Apart from these, SocialBots posses various security risks, one of which is befriending an OSN user thereby gaining access to personal details such as birthday, email id, phone number, address, etc. Detection of these SocialBots is therefore an important problem to be solved in order to maintain the reputation of OSN. Our work concentrates on behavioral analysis of these SocialBots in the OSN and identifying features to be used to develop a model for detection of these Socialbots using machine learning. The model, thus developed, is further used as a background process to create a web-based tool for detection of SocialBots. In our work, we created a SocialBot to perform behavioral analysis. This SocialBot got a good response from the real users and was able to grab 100+ real followers along with some real interactions in form of retweet, mention and direct messages.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Number of times users has interacted with the Tweet. This include all clicks anywhere on the tweet [17].

  2. 2.

    When we say “impression”, we mean that a tweet has been delivered to the Twitter stream of a particular account [20].

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Correspondence to Madhuri Dewangan .

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© 2016 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

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Dewangan, M., Kaushal, R. (2016). SocialBot: Behavioral Analysis and Detection. In: Mueller, P., Thampi, S., Alam Bhuiyan, M., Ko, R., Doss, R., Alcaraz Calero, J. (eds) Security in Computing and Communications. SSCC 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 625. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2738-3_39

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2738-3_39

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-10-2737-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-2738-3

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