A Deep Learning Approach to Online Social Network Account Compromisation

The major threat to online social network (OSN) users is account compromisation. Spammers now spread malicious messages by exploiting the trust relationship established between account owners and their friends. The challenge in detecting a compromised account by service providers is validating the trusted relationship established between the account owners, their friends, and the spammers. Another challenge is the increase in required human interaction with feature selection. Research available on supervised learning has limitations with feature selection and accounts that cannot be profiled, like application programming interface (API). Therefore, this article discusses the various behaviors of OSN users and the current approaches in detecting a compromised OSN account, emphasizing its limitations and challenges. We propose a deep learning approach that addresses and resolve the constraints faced by previous schemes. We detailed our proposed optimized nonsymmetric deep autoencoder (OPT_NSDAE) for unsupervised feature learning, which reduces the required human interaction levels in the selection and extraction of features. We evaluated our proposed classifier using three different social network datasets, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, in addition to the NSL-KDD and KDDCUP’99 datasets, in a graphical-user-interface-enabled Weka application. The experimental results show that our proposed approach outperformed most of the traditional schemes in OSN compromised account detection.