On the impact of social botnets for spam distribution and digital-influence manipulation

Online social networks (OSNs) are increasingly threatened by social bots which are software-controlled OSN accounts that mimic human users with malicious intentions. A social botnet refers to a group of social bots under the control of a single botmaster, which collaborate to conduct malicious behavior, while at the same time mimicking the interactions among normal OSN users to reduce their individual risk of being detected. We demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of exploiting a social botnet for spam distribution and digital-influence manipulation through real experiments on Twitter and also trace-driven simulations. Our results can help understand the potentially detrimental effects of social botnets and help OSNs improve their bot(net) detection systems.