http://www.csoonline.com/article/738100/researchers-explore-underground-market-of-twitter-spam-and-abuse
By Steve Ragan
Staff Writer
CSO Online
August 14, 2013
Researchers presented data from an ICSI (International Computer Science
Institute) driven project Wednesday at the 22nd USENIX Security Symposium
in Washington, D.C., that explores the underground market of spam and
abuse on Twitter.
Led by Vern Paxson of International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and
Chris Grier of UC Berkeley, the group 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 inflate
follower counts. Research participants from George Mason University and
Twitter also took part.
Their research took ten months, and during that time they examined 27
merchants responsible for several million fraudulent accounts. Of those,
95 percent of them were taken offline after the researchers reported them
to Twitter. However, the paper says that these merchants were responsible
for nearly 10-20 percent of all the illegitimate accounts created on the
service during the monitoring period, and that the criminals controlling
these market places earned $127,000 to $159,000 for their efforts.
The study was limited to Twitter, only because the researchers couldn't
obtain permission from other social networks, such as Facebook, Google,
and Yahoo -- each of which the researchers observed being actively abused
by the merchants peddling accounts. As part of their service offerings,
the merchants observed during the study promise such things as spam
hosting, CAPTCHA solving, PPI (Pay-Per-Install) programs, and exploit
kits.
[...]
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