Visible to the public An Early Warning System for Suspicious Accounts

TitleAn Early Warning System for Suspicious Accounts
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2017
AuthorsHalawa, Hassan, Ripeanu, Matei, Beznosov, Konstantin, Coskun, Baris, Liu, Meizhu
Conference NameProceedings of the 10th ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-4503-5202-4
Keywordscomposability, compositionality, Computational Intelligence, cryptography, early warning system, online account security, pubcrawl, supervised learning
AbstractIn the face of large-scale automated cyber-attacks to large online services, fast detection and remediation of compromised accounts are crucial to limit the spread of new attacks and to mitigate the overall damage to users, companies, and the public at large. We advocate a fully automated approach based on machine learning to enable large-scale online service providers to quickly identify potentially compromised accounts. We develop an early warning system for the detection of suspicious account activity with the goal of quick identification and remediation of compromised accounts. We demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of our proposed system in a four month experiment at a large-scale online service provider using real-world production data encompassing hundreds of millions of users. We show that - even using only login data, features with low computational cost, and a basic model selection approach - around one out of five accounts later flagged as suspicious are correctly predicted a month in advance based on one week's worth of their login activity.
URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3128572.3140455
DOI10.1145/3128572.3140455
Citation Keyhalawa_early_2017