A Worm Containment Approach Towards Online Social Networks

Abstract

The online social network(OSN) phenomenon has emerged over the past ten years. Unfortunately, worms that target OSNs have become a major security threat to both the websites and their users in recent years. From our observation, we find that propagation features of these worms are highly related to the characteristics of OSNs. In this paper, we propose a new approach to do worm containment in OSNs. Firstly, we capture user connection characteristics and then establish the weighted user relationship graph which can be used in worm containment. Secondly, we propose a novel hierarchical partition algorithm to divide the nodes into difference areas based on analyzing the characteristic of the OSN structure. Finally, we leverage a new worm containment method by taking advantage of the impact of users' crucial influence on propagation. We set up experiments to verify our approach. The experiments shows that our containment strategy can restrain the worm propagation and fix the infection effectively.