On Detecting Growing-Up Behaviors of Malicious Accounts in Privacy-Centric Mobile Social Networks

Privacy-centric mobile social network (PC-MSN), which allows users to build intimate and private social circles, is an increasingly popular type of online social networks (OSNs). Because of strict usage policy enforced by PC-MSNs (such as restricted account and content access), malicious accounts (or users) have to act like normal accounts to accumulate credentials before committing malicious activities. Therefore, analysis merely relying on static account profile information or social graphs is ineffective to detect such growing-up accounts. Besides, existing behavior-based malicious account detection methods fail to effectively detect growing-up accounts who pretend to be benign and have similar behaviors to benign users during the growing-up stage.