
arXiv: 1902.04506
handle: 20.500.14243/392184 , 11573/1568329 , 11568/994858
Within OSNs, many of our supposedly online friends may instead be fake accounts called social bots, part of large groups that purposely re-share targeted content. Here, we study retweeting behaviors on Twitter, with the ultimate goal of detecting retweeting social bots. We collect a dataset of 10M retweets. We design a novel visualization that we leverage to highlight benign and malicious patterns of retweeting activity. In this way, we uncover a 'normal' retweeting pattern that is peculiar of human-operated accounts, and 3 suspicious patterns related to bot activities. Then, we propose a bot detection technique that stems from the previous exploration of retweeting behaviors. Our technique, called Retweet-Buster (RTbust), leverages unsupervised feature extraction and clustering. An LSTM autoencoder converts the retweet time series into compact and informative latent feature vectors, which are then clustered with a hierarchical density-based algorithm. Accounts belonging to large clusters characterized by malicious retweeting patterns are labeled as bots. RTbust obtains excellent detection results, with F1 = 0.87, whereas competitors achieve F1 < 0.76. Finally, we apply RTbust to a large dataset of retweets, uncovering 2 previously unknown active botnets with hundreds of accounts.
Social and Information Networks (cs.SI), FOS: Computer and information sciences, Computer Science - Cryptography and Security, Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence, OSN security; Retweet patterns; Social bots; Twitter, Computer Science - Social and Information Networks, [object Object], osn security, retweet patterns, social bots, twitter, Computer Science - Computers and Society, Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI), Computers and Society (cs.CY), Cryptography and Security (cs.CR), [object Object
Social and Information Networks (cs.SI), FOS: Computer and information sciences, Computer Science - Cryptography and Security, Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence, OSN security; Retweet patterns; Social bots; Twitter, Computer Science - Social and Information Networks, [object Object], osn security, retweet patterns, social bots, twitter, Computer Science - Computers and Society, Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI), Computers and Society (cs.CY), Cryptography and Security (cs.CR), [object Object
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