Dirty Jobs: The Role of Freelance Labor in Web Service Abuse

Modern Web services inevitably engender abuse, as attackers find ways to exploit a service and its user base. However, while defending against such abuse is generally considered a technical endeavor, we argue that there is an increasing role played by human labor markets. Using over seven years of data from the popular crowdsourcing site Freelancer.com, as well data from our own active job solicitations, we characterize the labor market involved in service abuse. We identify the largest classes of abuse work, including account creation, social networking link generation and search engine optimization support, and characterize how pricing and demand have evolved in supporting this activity.