DETECTION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF FAKE ACCOUNTS ON THE PINTEREST SOCIAL NETWORK

摘要

Since the beginning of Online Social Networks (OSN) they have played a main role in the way people pursue they social life. Almost everyone's social life has become associated with social networks, building your own community and keeping in contact with friends has not been easier and enjoyable. Some OSNs did not survive for long, while others manage to stand still. With the rapid growth of any OSN, and as they rise in popularity, many problems also arise, like online impersonation, fake accounts, and spam. Pinterest, the new member of the OSN family, has become a star in almost no time. As Pinterest gains that much publicity among users, spammers have found their way to it too. In this paper, we try to take a closer look on spammers' activity on Pinterest, trying to make a good understanding of how they operate and how they target end users. Using our analysis we were able to build a detection system and ran it over our Dataset of real user accounts from Pinterest, our system were able to distinguish between fake accounts and legitimate user accounts. The true positive rate of our system exceeds 90% while the false positive rate was 0%.