Methods to Detect Cyberthreats on Twitter

Abstract

Twitter is a microblogging service where users can post short messages and communicate with millions of users instantaneously. Twitter has been used for marketing, political campaigns, and during catastrophic events. Unfortunately, Twitter has been exploited by spammers and cybercriminals to post spam, spread malware, and launch different kinds of cyberattacks. The ease of following another user on Twitter, the posting of shortened URLs in tweets, the use of trending hashtags in tweets, and so on, have made innocent users the victims of various cyberattacks. This chapter reviews recent methods to detect spam, spammers, cybercus content, and suspicious users on Twitter. It also presents a unified framework for modeling hreats on Twitter are discussed, specifically in the context of big data and adversarial machine learning.