Researchers explore underground market of Twitter spam and abuse

Data presented at the 22nd USENIX Security Symposium by researchers at ICSI (International Computer Science Institute)from a project exploring the underground market of spam and abuse on Twitter. Vern Paxson of ICSI and Chris Grier of UC Berkeley led a group that tracked the criminal market on Twitter, which sells access to accounts that are later used to push spam, malicious links (including Phishing and malware) as well as inflation of follower accounts. The research of 10 months was limited to Twitter because the researchers were unable to get permission from Facebook, Google, and Yahoo, social networks the reserachers observed as being actively abused by merchants responsible for several million fraudulent accounts. See complete article at CSO - Security and Risk.

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