Redmond researchers profile Skype scammers

snoopy · Jan 24, 2014

Redmond researchers profile Skype scammers
Markov models sniff out the fake IDs and spammy creeps

With Skype as their test platform, the group says it was able to achieve 68 per cent successful detection of fake accounts within four months of activity, while keeping false positives down to 5 per cent. At the same time, it claimed, it achieved a reduction in “the number of undetected fraudulent users active for over 10 months by a factor of 2.3.”

The aim, the researchers say, was to identify fraudsters “that have eluded the first line of detection systems and have been active for months”, drawing on static profile information such as age, active profile information such as the time series of a user's calls, social behaviour (adding or deleting friend contacts), and social features (such as PageRank).

The researchers note that one of their statistical techniques, the application of hidden Markov models (HMMs) to this context is new (although, interestingly, one of the authors of the paper, Moises Goldszmidt, has previously used HMMs to help predict disk failure in data centres).
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Full story here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/21/boffins_hammer_skype_spammers/

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