Social bots invade Facebook

Would it surprise you to know that some of your new friends on Facebook or even Twitter could be robots and not humans? And that they're not quite friendly at all?

 

Researchers at the University of British Columbia's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering found these bots are trying to promote products.

 

"These social bots masquerade as online users, adding posts that seem like they came from real people. But they secretly promote products or viewpoints, and some you might friend use their new connections to siphon off your private information. When coordinated by a botmaster, these social bots can wreak havoc and steal information at a massive scale," PC World reported.

 

PC World said researchers published their findings as "The Socialbot Network: When Bots Socialize for Fame and Money."

 

In the study, four UBC scientists designed a "social botnet" of automatic "friends," and used the social botnet on Facebook.

 

While traditional botnets can easily be found out, these social bots "imitated people well enough to infiltrate social networks," the report said.

 

"That's not such a big issue with only one fake profile, but if the programmer can control hundreds or thousands of them, then it becomes possible to saturate large parts of the system, to gain access to massive amounts of private data, and to wreck the security model that makes online social networks safe," it said.

 

Also, the researchers found selling Facebook friends would be more profitable than traditional data theft.

 

For its part, Facebook has acknowledged that its service has tens of millions of fake accounts, PC World said.

 

"Other services such as Twitter and comment sections of websites also have hefty numbers of fake accounts used by spammers and phishers. Just imagine how those numbers could grow once social bots become more than a university experiment -- and how much more effective they could be at fooling us all," it said.

 

Success rate

 

The UBC researchers developed a program that creates Facebook profiles and friends regular users, but it was so successful the fake profiles even got friend requests.

 

"We saw that the success rate can be up to 80 percent. That was quite impressive," said researcher Kosta Beznosov.

 

Of the unsolicited messages and requests the bots got from people, the female social bots got 20 to 30 times the number of friend requests from people as male bots.

 

The researchers had the social bots imitate people by create profiles that they decorate, then develop connections while posting interesting material from the Internet.

 

"We were inspired by the paper where they befriend your friends, but on a different social network. For example, they know who your Facebook friends are. They can take this information and take a public picture of you, then create a profile on a completely different social network," Beznosov said.

 

Sociology over security

 

The researchers used the century-old principle of "triadic closure," where two parties connected by a mutual acquaintance will likely connect directly to each other.

 

Researcher Ildar Muslukhov said the UBC team had to solve many CAPTCHAs, and eventually turned to human-powered services.

 

The researchers also said the complexity of social botnets makes it difficult to make an effective security policy against them. — TJD, GMA News