Abusing social networks with abuse reports: A coalition attack for social networks

Abstract

In Social Network websites, the users can report the bad behaviors of other users. In order to do so, they can create a kind of escalation ticket called abuse report in which they detail the infraction made by the “bad” user and help the website moderator to decide on a penalty. Today Social Networks count billions of users, the handling of the abuse reports is no more executed manually by moderators; they currently rely on some algorithms that automatically block the “bad” users until a moderator takes care of the case. In this paper we purport to demonstrate how such algorithms are maliciously used by attackers to illegally block innocent victims. We also propose to automate such an attack to demonstrate the big damage that can be caused in current social network websites. We also took the case study of Facebook as proof of concept.