Botnet Campaign Detection on Twitter

Abstract

The goal of this thesis is to investigate and analyze botnet activity on social media networks. We first start by creating an algorithm and scoring method for “likely bots,” and analyze them in conjunction with their neighboring messages to determine whether there is a likely group of bots, or botnet. Chapters 1 & 2 cover the overview of the work, and the previous research done by others.

Multiple datasets were collected from Twitter, over different time frames, including random samples, and targeted topics. Chapters 3 & 4 cover the methodology and results of the approach using these datasets. The method is shown to have high accuracy.