Understanding compromised accounts on Twitter

Social media has become a valuable tool for hackers to disseminate misinformation through compromised accounts. A compromised account is an account accessed by a third party without the user's knowledge. Previous studies have found 13% of online adults experienced their social media accounts compromised. Since compromised accounts can have a significant adverse impact on the social media sites, this has led to the growing research on detecting compromised accounts. However, previous works are limited as they either focus on the detection of hacked accounts for spamming and phishing activities or utilize only twitter content information. In this paper, we performed a systematic study on compromised accounts in Twitter by identifying who compromise the accounts; what information they share, and what patterns their tweets present. Our findings suggest that the accounts can be compromised by two different types of hackers and the content they post tend to follow several common themes. We also showed that, in addition to the text content of the tweets, there are other meta-information that can be exploited to help improve the detection of compromised accounts.