This year we have a paper studying the activity of suspended users on Twitter, which will appear at IMC in November. The title is “Suspended Accounts In Retrospect: An Analysis of Twitter Spam“, and the paper presents a unique perspective on spam as compared to our previous papers (in CCS and S&P). We look back in time and collect the spam tweets sent by users who were eventually suspended, and then try and tie as much together as we can.
For example, one spam campaign, advertising a single landing page, can use well over 100,000 twitter accounts, and send millions of tweets. Each of the accounts involved was created for the purpose of sending spam, and generally has never sent a non-spam tweet (there are some exceptions to this of course!). The resources of the Twitter spammers is quite impressive — being able to throw away 100k accounts (they all get suspended eventually) after sending a few tweets demonstrates the account resources they have at hand.
Anyway, read more in a couple weeks when we post the PDF!