A Propagation Model for Social Engineering Botnets in Social Networks

Abstract

With the rapid development of social networking services and the diversification of social engineering attacks, new high-infection botnet (called SE-botnet by us), which exploits social engineering attacks to spread bots in social networks, has become an underlying threat. Predicting the threat of SE-botnet can help defenders mitigate it effectively. In this paper, we focus on SE-botnet's infection and defense, presenting a propagation model for it. We take full account of social networks' characteristics and human dynamics, and abstract the general process of social engineering attacks used by SE-botnet. Our preliminary simulation results demonstrate that the SE-botnet can capture tens of thousands of bots in one day with a great infection capacity. our propagation model can accurately predict this process with less than 5% deviation.