Spotting Suspicious Link Behavior with fBox: An Adversarial Perspective

Abstract: How can we detect suspicious users in large online networks? Online popularity of a user or product (via follows, page-likes, etc.) can be monetized on the premise of higher ad click-through rates or increased sales. Web services and social networks which incentivize popularity thus suffer from a major problem of fake connections from link fraudsters looking to make a quick buck. Typical methods of catching this suspicious behavior use spectral techniques to spot large groups of often blatantly fraudulent (but sometimes honest) users. However, small-scale, stealthy attacks may go unnoticed due to the nature of low-rank eigenanalysis used in practice. In this work, we take an adversarial approach to find and prove claims about the weaknesses of modern, state-of-the-art spectral methods and propose fBox, an algorithm designed to catch small-scale, stealth attacks that slip below the radar. Our algorithm has the following desirable properties: (a) it has theoretical underpinnings, (b) it is shown to be highly effective on real data and (c) it is scalable (linear on the input size). We evaluate fBox on a large, public 41.7 million node, 1.5 billion edge who-follows-whom social graph from Twitter in 2010 and with high precision identify many suspicious accounts which have persisted without suspension even to this day.