Detecting Organization-Targeted Socialbots by Monitoring Social Network Profiles

Networks and Spatial Economics - Advanced attackers use online social networks in order to extract useful information about targeted organizations, including the names of the organization’s...     

Organization Mining Using Online Social Networks

Complementing the formal organizational structure of a business are the informal connections among employees. These relationships help identify knowledge hubs, working groups, and shortcuts through the organizational structure. They carry valuable information on how a company functions de facto. In the past, eliciting the informal social networks within an organization was challenging; today they are reflected by friendship relationships in online social networks. In this paper we analyze several commercial organizations by mining data which their employees have exposed on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other publicly available sources. Using a web crawler designed for this purpose, we extract a network of informal social relationships among employees of targeted organizations. Our results show that it is possible to identify leadership roles within the organization solely by using centrality analysis and machine learning techniques applied to the informal relationship network structure. Valuable non-trivial insights can also be gained by clustering an organization’s social network and gathering publicly available information on the employees within each cluster. Knowledge of the network of informal relationships may be a major asset or might be a significant threat to the underlying organization.     

Incremental deployment of network monitors based on Group Betweenness Centrality

In many applications we are required to increase the deployment of a distributed monitoring system on an evolving network. In this paper we present a new method for finding candidate locations for additional deployment in the network. This method is based on the Group Betweenness Centrality (GBC) measure that is used to estimate the influence of a group of nodes over the information flow in the network. The new method assists in finding the location of k additional monitors in the evolving network, such that the portion of additional traffic covered is at least (1−1/e) of the optimal.     

Target oriented network intelligence collection: effective exploration of social networks

World Wide Web - Target Oriented Network Intelligence Collection (TONIC) is a crawling process whose goal is to find social network profiles that contain information about a given target. Such...