The problem of detecting bots, automated social media accounts governed by software but disguising as human users, has strong implications. For example, bots have been used to sway political elections by distorting online discourse, to manipulate the stock market, or to push anti-vaccine conspiracy theories that caused health epidemics. Most techniques proposed to date detect bots at the accoun...

The rich functionality of modern personal computers combined with ineffective deployment of practical security solutions opens the door to a wide variety of attacks and exploits on their applications. This in turn has led to an extremely widespread propagation of malware, or software designed to perform hostile activities without the owner’s consent. An increasingly common phenomenon is for mal...

Recently, the increase in “spam,” distributed denialof-service (DDoS) attacks, and other acts of online crime are facilitated by “botnets,” which are networks of compromised computer systems executing “bot” programs. In this paper, we precisely define the terms bot and botnet and explain their workings. We describe how miscreants have used and continue to use botnets to launch the aforementione...

Networks of compromised machines called botnets are one of the most threatening adversaries over the Internet due in large part to the difficulty of identifying botnet traffic patterns. We have witnessed that existing signature-based detection and protection methods are ineffective in dealing with new unknown bots. By slightly modifying the code of an existing bot, bot commanders can bypass mos...

abstract—today, botnets have become a serious threat to enterprise networks. by creation of network of bots, they launch several attacks, distributed denial of service attacks (ddos) on networks is a sample of such attacks. such attacks with the occupation of system resources, have proven to be an effective method of denying network services. botnets that launch http packet flood attacks agains...

Recent research has shown a substantial active presence of bots in online social networks (OSNs). In this paper we utilise our past work on studying bots (Stweeler) to comparatively analyse the usage and impact of bots and humans on Twitter, one of the largest OSNs in the world. We collect a large-scale Twitter dataset and define various metrics based on tweet metadata. We divide and filter the...