Research

CopyCatch: Stopping Group Attacks by Spotting Lockstep Behavior in Social Networks

May 13, 2013

Abstract

In this paper we focus on the social network Facebook and the problem of discerning ill-gotten Page Likes, made by spammers hoping to turn a profit, from legitimate Page Likes. Our method, which we refer to as CopyCatch, detects lockstep Page Like patterns on Facebook by analyzing only the social graph between users and Pages and the times at which the edges in the graph (the Likes) were created.

We offer the following contributions: (1) We give a novel problem formulation, with a simple concrete definition of suspicious behavior in terms of graph structure and edge constraints. (2) We offer two algorithms to find such suspicious lockstep behavior – one provably-convergent iterative algorithm and one approximate, scalable MapReduce implementation. (3) We show that our method severely limits “greedy attacks” and analyze the bounds from the application of the Zarankiewicz problem to our setting.

Finally, we demonstrate and discuss the effectiveness of CopyCatch at Facebook and on synthetic data, as well as potential extensions to anomaly detection problems in other domains. CopyCatch is actively in use at Facebook, searching for attacks on Facebook’s social graph of over a billion users, many millions of Pages, and billions of Page Likes.

Download the Paper

Related Publications

February 06, 2025

Speech & Audio

Meta Audiobox Aesthetics: Unified Automatic Quality Assessment for Speech, Music, and Sound

Andros Tjandra, Yi-Chiao Wu, Baishan Guo, John Hoffman, Brian Ellis, Apoorv Vyas, Bowen Shi, Sanyuan Chen, Matt Le, Nick Zacharov, Carleigh Wood, Ann Lee, Wei-Ning Hsu

February 06, 2025

February 06, 2025

NLP

Brain-to-Text Decoding: A Non-invasive Approach via Typing

Jarod Levy, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Svetlana Pinet, Jérémy Rapin, Hubert Jacob Banville, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Jean Remi King

February 06, 2025

February 06, 2025

NLP

From Thought to Action: How a Hierarchy of Neural Dynamics Supports Language Production

Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Jarod Levy, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Jérémy Rapin, F.-Xavier Alario, Pierre Bourdillon, Svetlana Pinet, Jean Remi King

February 06, 2025

November 27, 2022

Core Machine Learning

Neural Attentive Circuits

Nicolas Ballas, Bernhard Schölkopf, Chris Pal, Francesco Locatello, Li Erran, Martin Weiss, Nasim Rahaman, Yoshua Bengio

November 27, 2022

April 08, 2021

Responsible AI

Integrity

Towards measuring fairness in AI: the Casual Conversations dataset

Caner Hazirbas, Joanna Bitton, Brian Dolhansky, Jacqueline Pan, Albert Gordo, Cristian Canton Ferrer

April 08, 2021

April 30, 2018

The Role of Minimal Complexity Functions in Unsupervised Learning of Semantic Mappings | Facebook AI Research

Tomer Galanti, Lior Wolf, Sagie Benaim

April 30, 2018

April 30, 2018

Computer Vision

NAM – Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Mapping without Cycles or GANs | Facebook AI Research

Yedid Hoshen, Lior Wolf

April 30, 2018

December 11, 2019

Speech & Audio

Computer Vision

Hyper-Graph-Network Decoders for Block Codes | Facebook AI Research

Eliya Nachmani, Lior Wolf

December 11, 2019

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.