
Departmental Papers (CIS)
Date of this Version
9-1-2011
Document Type
Conference Paper
Recommended Citation
Andrew G. West, Jian Chang, Krishna Venkatasubramanian, Oleg Sokolsky, and Insup Lee, "Link Spamming Wikipedia for Profit", 8th Annual Collaboration, Electronic Messaging, Anti-Abuse, and Spam Conference , 152-161. September 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2030376.2030394
Abstract
Collaborative functionality is an increasingly prevalent web technology. To encourage participation, these systems usually have low barriers-to-entry and permissive privileges. Unsurprisingly, ill-intentioned users try to leverage these characteristics for nefarious purposes. In this work, a particular abuse is examined -- link spamming -- the addition of promotional or otherwise inappropriate hyperlinks.
Our analysis focuses on the "wiki" model and the collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia, in particular. A principal goal of spammers is to maximize *exposure*, the quantity of people who view a link. Creating and analyzing the first Wikipedia link spam corpus, we find that existing spam strategies perform quite poorly in this regard. The status quo spamming model relies on link persistence to accumulate exposures, a strategy that fails given the diligence of the Wikipedia community. Instead, we propose a model that exploits the latency inherent in human anti-spam enforcement.
Statistical estimation suggests our novel model would produce significantly more link exposures than status quo techniques. More critically, the strategy could prove economically viable for perpetrators, incentivizing its exploitation. To this end, we address mitigation strategies.
Subject Area
CPS Internet of Things
Publication Source
8th Annual Collaboration, Electronic Messaging, Anti-Abuse, and Spam Conference
Start Page
152
Last Page
161
DOI
10.1145/2030376.2030394
Copyright/Permission Statement
© ACM 2011. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the 8th Annual Collaboration, Electronic Messaging, Anti-Abuse, and Spam Conference, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2030376.2030394.
Keywords
collaboration, link spam, wiki, measurement study, spam attack model, defense strategies
Included in
Applied Statistics Commons, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Commons, Other Computer Sciences Commons
Date Posted: 07 September 2011
This document has been peer reviewed.
Comments
8th Annual Collaboration, Electronic Messaging, Anti-Abuse, and Spam Conference Perth, Australia, September 2011 (co-Best Paper Award).