Unmasking Malignant Facebook Applications - A survey

Authors

Geetanjali A N
Dept of CSE, VKIT, Bangalore, India
Arpitha T
Dept of CSE, VKIT, Bangalore, India
Deepti V Bhat
Dept of CSE, VKIT, Bangalore, India
Kavya L R
Dept of CSE, VKIT, Bangalore, India
Kavya M S
Dept of CSE, VKIT, Bangalore, India

Synopsis

Facebook applications are the reasons for Facebook attractiveness. Unfortunately, many users are still not aware of the fact that many malicious Facebook applications exist. Each app having 20 million installs per day, third party apps have become major reason for the popularity and addictiveness of Facebook. But, cyber criminals have realized the potential of using apps for spreading malware and spam like unsolicited mail. The problem is already considered, as we find that at least 13% of apps in the sample dataset are malicious. As per the research community, it is mostfocused on detecting malicious posts and campaigns. In this paper, we try to answer a question: Given a Facebook application, Would the people be able to detect whether a application is malicious or not? Our key contribution is surveying, FRAppE—Facebook’s Rigorous Application Evaluator—being the primary tool focused on detecting malicious apps on Facebook. There are 2.4 million of people using Facebook. So, in order to develop FRAppE, the information about the posting behavior of the app users is observed and collected. FRAppE is shown that it can detect malicious apps with 99.5% accuracy, with no false positives and a low false negative rate. Long term, we see FRAppE as a step towards creating an independent watchdog for app assessment and ranking.

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Published
June 12, 2018
Online ISSN
2582-3922