Title: A computational framework for detecting malicious actors in communities

Authors: Justin Zhan; Xing Fang

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, North Carolina A&T State University, 1601 East Market Street, Greensboro, NC, 27410, USA ' Department of Computational Science and Engineering, North Carolina A&T State University, 1601 East Market Street, Greensboro, NC, 27410, USA

Abstract: Despite the significant research achievements on the study of communities, how to maintain a benign social environment for a community, as a problem, has not received much attention. Current existing malicious activity detecting mechanisms are subject to the limitation of the underlying online environment. However, we found that information plays an important role in terms of socialisation. Malicious activities, like diffusing unreliable information and providing inappropriate critics, can severely impact the situation of a community's social environment. In this paper, we propose a computational framework for detecting malicious actors in communities from the perspective of information diffusion. We use the term, 'malicious actors', to represent a group of people who intentionally or unintentionally conduct malicious behaviours to sabotage benign social environments of communities.

Keywords: malicious actors; information diffusion; computational framework; malicious activity; online communities; web based communities; virtual communities; unreliable information; inappropriate criticism; malicious behaviour.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIPSI.2014.062863

International Journal of Information Privacy, Security and Integrity, 2014 Vol.2 No.1, pp.1 - 20

Published online: 13 Sep 2014 *

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