Title: Attacking Strategies and Temporal Analysis Involving Facebook Discussion Groups,
Abstract: Online social network (OSN) discussion groups are exerting significant
effects on political dialogue. In the absence of access control mechanisms, any
user can contribute to any OSN thread. Individuals can exploit this
characteristic to execute targeted attacks, which increases the potential for
subsequent malicious behaviors such as phishing and malware distribution. These
kinds of actions will also disrupt bridges among the media, politicians, and
their constituencies.
For the concern of Security Management, blending malicious cyberattacks with
online social interactions has introduced a brand new challenge. In this paper
we describe our proposal for a novel approach to studying and understanding the
strategies that attackers use to spread malicious URLs across Facebook
discussion groups. We define and analyze problems tied to predicting the
potential for attacks focused on threads created by news media organizations.
We use a mix of macro static features and the micro dynamic evolution of posts
and threads to identify likely targets with greater than 90% accuracy. One of
our secondary goals is to make such predictions within a short (10 minute) time
frame. It is our hope that the data and analyses presented in this paper will
support a better understanding of attacker strategies and footprints, thereby
developing new system management methodologies in handing cyber attacks on
social networks.