Toward worm detection in online social networks

Worms propagating in online social networking (OSN) websites have become a major security threat to both the websites and their users in recent years. Since these worms exhibit unique propagation vectors, existing Internet worm detection mechanisms cannot be applied to them. In this work, we propose an early warning OSN worms detection system, which leverages both the propagation characteristics of these worms and the topological properties of online social networks. Our system can effectively monitor the entire social graph by keeping only a small number of user accounts under surveillance. Moreover, the system applies a two-level correlation scheme to reduce the noise from normal user communications such that infected user accounts can be identified with a higher accuracy. Our evaluation on the real social graph data obtained from Flickr indicates

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ACSAC
• Authors: Wei Xu, Fangfang Zhang, Sencun Zhu
• Keywords: ACSAC 2010, OSN Worms Detection, Security Privacy, Social Graph, User Accounts