Paper Info
Title
Link spamming Wikipedia for profit
Abstract
Collaborative functionality is an increasingly prevalent web technology. To encourage participation, these systems usually have low barriers-to-entry and permissive privileges. Unsurprisingly, ill-intentioned users try to leverage these characteristics for nefarious purposes. In this work, a particular abuse is examined -- link spamming -- the addition of promotional or otherwise inappropriate hyperlinks. Our analysis focuses on the wiki model and the collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia, in particular. A principal goal of spammers is to maximize exposure, the quantity of people who view a link. Creating and analyzing the first Wikipedia link spam corpus, we find that existing spam strategies perform quite poorly in this regard. The status quo spamming model relies on link persistence to accumulate exposures, a strategy that fails given the diligence of the Wikipedia community. Instead, we propose a model that exploits the latency inherent in human anti-spam enforcement. Statistical estimation suggests our novel model would produce significantly more link exposures than status quo techniques. More critically, the strategy could prove economically viable for perpetrators, incentivizing its exploitation. To this end, we address mitigation strategies.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1145/2030376.2030394
CEAS
Keywords
Field
DocType
mitigation strategy,wiki model,spamming model,link exposure,particular abuse,wikipedia community,novel model,wikipedia link spam corpus,link spamming,spamming wikipedia,link persistence,barriers to entry,attack model,wikipedia,collaboration
World Wide Web,Attack model,Internet privacy,Leverage (finance),Status quo,Computer science,Exploit,Hyperlink,Enforcement,Encyclopedia,Spamming
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.45
23
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Andrew G. West119212.49
Jian Chang2675.81
Krishna Venkatasubramanian3202.49
Oleg Sokolsky42193154.94
Insup Lee54996413.64