The Security Group at UCSB Received the Best Student Paper Award at ACSAC 2010

The security group at UCSB will present the paper “Detecting Spammers on Social Networks”, authored by Gianluca Stringhini, Christopher Kruegel, and Giovanni Vigna. It received the best student paper award at ACSAC 2010. This work shows the results of a one year observation of spamming profiles on three major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace). Leveraging their observations, and the typical traits that spam profiles show, the authors developed a system able to automatically detect spammers on Twitter, and actively cooperated with the social network itself to shut down over 15,000 spam profiles.

ACSAC (Annual Computer Security Applications Conference) is an academic conference focused on practical computer security. Papers published in this conference discuss real world problems in computer security, proposing solutions to mitigate or solve them. This year’s ACSAC will be held in Austin, TX, starting on December 6. This conference gained popularity over the years, and in this coming edition will propose 39 accepted papers, which lead to an acceptance rate of 17%.