Detection of Fake and Clone accounts in Twitter using Classification and Distance Measure Algorithms

Online Social Network (OSN) is a network hub where people with similar interests or real world relationships interact. As the popularity of OSN is increasing, the security and privacy issues related to it are also rising. Fake and Clone profiles are creating dangerous security problems to social network users. Cloning of user profiles is one serious threat, where already existing user's details are stolen to create duplicate profiles and then it is misused for damaging the identity of original profile owner. They can even launch threats like phishing, stalking, spamming etc. Fake profile is the creation of profile in the name of a person or a company which does not really exist in social media, to carry out malicious activities. In this paper, a detection method has been proposed which can detect Fake and Clone profiles in Twitter. Fake profiles are detected based on set of rules that can effectively classify fake and genuine profiles. For Profile Cloning detection two methods are used. One using Similarity Measures and the other using C4.5 decision tree algorithm. In Similarity Measures, two types of similarities are considered - Similarity of Attributes and Similarity of Network relationships. C4.5 detects clones by building decision tree by taking information gain into consideration. A comparison is made to check how well these two methods help in detecting clone profiles.