VB2018 paper: Uncovering the wholesale industry of social media fraud: from botnet to bulk reseller panels

On the day of the 2018 US mid-term elections, there will be few who are not aware of the activity of botnets on social media and how these, allegedly, have tried to influence elections. But social media fraud doesn’t just restrict itself to elections – fake

Facebook

,

Twitter

and

Instagram

likes and followers have long been sold to vain social media users.

In a

paper

presented at VB2018 in Montreal, co-written with her colleague Olivier Bilodeau,

GoSecure

researcher Masarah Paquet-Clouston looked at the subject of social media fraud and detailed the full supply chain behind it: from the IoT botnet used to generate and manage the fake accounts to the reseller panels where people can buy likes or followers.

Today, we publish Masarah’s paper in both

HTML

and

PDF

format.

Potential supply chain for the social media fraud (SMF) industry.

For more on this subject, watch the

VB2015 presentation

by Olivier Bilodeau (then at

ESET

) on the the Linux/Moose botnet used in this kind of fraud.