COMPUTING RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT OF THE WEEK [October 2 -9]
App Protects Facebook Users from Hackers
Cyber-crime is expanding to the fertile grounds of social networks and University of California, Riverside engineers are fighting it.
A recent four-month experiment conducted by several UC Riverside engineering professors and graduate students found that the application they created to detect spam and malware posts on Facebook users’ walls was highly accurate, fast and efficient.
The researchers also introduced the new term “socware” – pronounced “sock-where” – to describe a combination of “social malware,” encompassing all criminal and parasitic behavior on online social networks.
Their free application, MyPageKeeper, successfully flagged 97 percent of socware during the experiment. In addition, it was only incorrect – flagging posts of socware that did not fit into those categories – 0.005 percent of the time.
The researchers also found that it took an average of .0046 seconds to classify a post, which is far quicker than the 1.9 seconds it takes using the traditional approach of web site crawling. MyPageKeeper’s more efficient classification also translates to lower costs, cutting expenses by up to 40 times.
Full Article...
Source: UCR Today
Researchers:
Harsha V. Madhyastha
Michalis Faloutsos
Md Sazzadur Rahman
Ting-Kai Huang
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Computing Research Highlight of the Week is a service of the Computing Community Consortium and the Computing Research Association designed to highlight some of the exciting and important recent research results in the computing fields. Each week a new highlight is chosen by CRA and CCC staff and volunteers from submissions from the computing community. Want your research featured? Submit it!.
