Comprehensive Analysis of Two Malicious Arabic-Language Twitter Campaigns

Fake malicious accounts are one of the primary causes of the deterioration of social network content quality. Numerous such accounts are generated by attackers to achieve multiple nefarious goals, including phishing, spamming, spoof- ing, and promotion. These practices pose significant challenges regarding the availability of credible data that reflect real- world social media interactions. This has led to the development of various methods and approaches to combat spammers on social media networks. Previous studies, however, have almost exclusively focused on studying and identifying English-language spam profiles, whereas the problem of malicious Arabic-language accounts remains under-addressed in the literature. In this paper, therefore, we conduct a comprehensive investigation of malicious Arabic-language campaigns on Twitter. The study involves analyzing the accounts of these campaigns from several perspectives, including their number, content, social interaction graphs, lifespans, and day-to-day activities. In addition to expos- ing their spamming tactics, we find that these spam accounts are more successful in avoiding Twitter suspensions that has been previously reported in the literature.

@article{Alharthi2021,
  title     = {Comprehensive Analysis of Two Malicious Arabic-Language Twitter Campaigns},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {12},
  number    = {4},
  year      = {2021},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Reem Alharthi and Areej Alhothali and Kawthar Moria},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120493},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120493}
}