How naïve are people on Internet Final, June 1st

Motivation All kinds of social media on Internet are glue connecting people in a virtual community. People awareness/ alertness on these social media have not been extensively studied. How people accept new friends in Facebook? How many people are trapped by spamming/ phishing? What the differences if these attacks are performed on different media? ……

Objective and Methodology Questions to answer: Can we quantify people’s behaviors on these social media, how naïve are they? Can we rank these media according to people’s alertness on them? High level methodology: Vertical: focus on each of these media individually and quantify the extent to which people’s awareness on them. For example, x% of people will be likely to accept you though they do not know you at all on Facebook. Horizontal: put these media together, and differentiate them. For instance, are people more careful about their communication than Facebook requests or IM?

Step 1, Facebook (Vertical) System Framework An automated facebook friending system, including, Automated user IDs crawler Automated friends requester Based on these tools, our experiment flowchart is,

Step 1, (cont.) Reverse engineering of facebook counter-measures Account creation: cell-phone validation or an authorized Sensitive to IP address: one logon per account at any time Rate limiting of Friend Requests ……

Step 1, (cont.) Experiment setting Sending requests to a random sample of 400 people each time. Mid-term results We got 40 and 35 in the first 3 days, and we get 100 friend acceptance for both profiles after a week. (95% confidence, no differences) Final-term results (20 days later) Can you guess what are the results? (A) >150 (B) >200 (C) >250 (D) >300 (E) >350 The answer is 393, are you surprising?

Step 1, (cont.) Max = 393 (98.25%), Min = 179 (44.75%), Mean = 318 (80%) These who have accept us usually have more friends in their list, (they are friendly) These who have not accepted us usually have less friends in the list, (Maybe they login Facebook rarely, or they are not friendly.) Some people have few friends, but also have accepted us, maybe b/c we have common friends. Requests from others Groups invitation Mafia wars requests Birthday requests …… Seems that requests have a correlation with the number of friends in one’s profiles.

Step 1, (cont.) Another interesting observation: In mid-term summary, we reported that well- created profiles receive less acceptance. Now, this is further confirmed Two well-created ones receive 101 and 200 acceptances during a months. (Male 101, Female 200) Ten other roughly-created ones receive 318 acceptances in average. WHY this is the case???

Following work Spamming/Phishing on s (Vertical) Comparison b/w different providers, such as Gmail, Yahoo, hotmail, institution/enterprise mail systems, and so on. Comparison b/w different contents. Requests on IM, and spam on IM (Vertical) Will people add you on IM friend list easily? Comparison b/w different contents for spamming/phishing. Any suggestion to include other media?

Following work (cont.) Do people differentiate these media? (horizontal study) For instance, it is likely that people may trust the more than the message from IM. Challenging: how to make the measurement work on this point be convincing? Empirical results of comparison between different populations of different media may not be considered representative. Statistically, do the experiments multiple time, and calculate the CI. Exploring a thread that can combine these different media together, i.e., finding a sample of people that have account on each of these media, and focus on these people.

Please give your comments Thanks!