Serf and turf: crowdturfing for fun and profit

摘要: Popular Internet services in recent years have shown that remarkable things can be achieved by harnessing the power of masses using crowd-sourcing systems. However, systems also pose a real challenge to existing security mechanisms deployed protect services. Many these techniques rely on assumption malicious activity is generated automatically automated programs. Thus they would perform poorly or easily bypassed when attacks are users working system. Through measurements, we found surprising evidence showing not only do exist, but rapidly growing both user base and total revenue. We describe this paper significant effort study understand "crowdturfing" today's Internet. use detailed crawls extract data about size operational structure crowdturfing analyze details campaigns offered performed sites, evaluate their end-to-end effectiveness running active, benign our own. Finally, compare source workers sites different countries. Our results suggest highly effective at reaching users, continuing growth poses concrete threat online communities US elsewhere.