Behaviour Profiling of Reactions in Facebook Posts for Anomaly Detection

Malicious attackers are highly interested in Facebook which is the most widely used Online Social Network. Malicious activities are massive nowadays in this network and spreading fake news, sending spam messages, fake applications and like jacking are a few among them, which leads to huge financial and reputation loss. The current scenario in the world is that the malicious activities are executed by heavily funded criminal groups. A larger part of Facebook accounts are either fake or compromised and they take part in malicious activities. Finding these malicious accounts is a challenging task. Social influence based behavioural analysis is one of the approaches towards detecting malicious activities. Facebook users are influenced by other user's posts/reactions. On observing the change in reactions, anomalous behaviour of the corresponding accounts can be identified. This paper proposes a method based on unsupervised clustering which analyse the reactions of users called smileys. The reactions are profiled and by applying similarity measures and unsupervised clustering techniques, they are further classified. This approach reveals the behaviour of immediate emotional responses of users to the various posts in Facebook. Since reactions are immediate, the analysis of these reactions provides important information to find anomalous behaviour in Facebook accounts

[1]  Michel Ballings,et al.  The added value of auxiliary data in sentiment analysis of Facebook posts , 2016, Decis. Support Syst..

[2]  Qiang Fu,et al.  Discovering hidden suspicious accounts in online social networks , 2017, Inf. Sci..

[3]  Xiuzhen Zhang,et al.  Anomaly detection in online social networks , 2014, Soc. Networks.

[4]  D. Lazer,et al.  The Strength of Strong Ties , 2003 .

[5]  Ben Y. Zhao,et al.  User interactions in social networks and their implications , 2009, EuroSys '09.

[6]  Ankit Gupta,et al.  Going Private in Public: A study on shift in behavioral trend using Facebook , 2017, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[7]  Mazdak Zamani,et al.  Security Threats in Online Social Networks , 2013, 2013 International Conference on Informatics and Creative Multimedia.

[8]  Robert Wuebker,et al.  The Strength of Strong Ties in an Emerging Industry: Experimental Evidence of the Effects of Status Hierarchies and Personal Ties in Venture Capitalist Decision-Making , 2014 .

[9]  Fabio Persia,et al.  Recognizing human behaviours in online social networks , 2018, Comput. Secur..

[10]  Mark S. Granovetter The Strength of Weak Ties , 1973, American Journal of Sociology.

[11]  Yuval Elovici,et al.  Online Social Networks: Threats and Solutions , 2013, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

[12]  Rizik M. H. Al-Sayyed,et al.  Online Social Networks Security: Threats, Attacks, and Future Directions , 2017 .

[13]  Sushil Jajodia,et al.  Profiling Online Social Behaviors for Compromised Account Detection , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

[14]  A. Hasib Threats of Online Social Networks , 2009 .

[15]  Roberto Di Pietro,et al.  Social Fingerprinting: Detection of Spambot Groups Through DNA-Inspired Behavioral Modeling , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.

[16]  P. Santhi Thilagam,et al.  Mining social networks for anomalies: Methods and challenges , 2016, J. Netw. Comput. Appl..