Pseudo-Honeypot: Toward Efficient and Scalable Spam Sniffer

Honeypot-based spammer gathering solutions usually lack attribute variability, deployment flexibility, and network scalability, deemed as their common drawbacks. This paper explores pseudo-honeypot, a novel honeypot-like system to overcome such drawbacks, for efficient and scalable spammer sniffing. The pseudo-honeypot takes advantage of user diversity and selects normal accounts, with attributes that have the higher potential of attracting spammers, as the parasitic bodies. By harnessing such category of users, pseudo-honeypot can monitor their streaming posts and behavioral patterns transparently. When compared with its traditional honeypot counterpart, the proposed solution offers the substantial advantages of attribute variability, deployment flexibility, network scalability, and system portability. Meanwhile, it offers a novel method to collect the social network dataset that has a higher probability of including spams and spammers, without being noticed by advanced spammers. We take the Twitter social network as an example to exhibit its system design, including pseudo-honeypot nodes selection, monitoring, feature extraction, ground truth labeling, and learning-based classification. Through experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency of pseudo-honeypot in terms of spams and spammers gathering. In particular, we confirm our solution can garner spammers at least 19 times faster than the state-of-the-art honeypot-based counterpart.