Smoke Screener or Straight Shooter: Detecting Elite Sybil Attacks in User-Review Social Networks

Popular User-Review Social Networks (URSNs)such as Dianping, Yelp, and Amazon-are often the targets of reputation attacks in which fake reviews are posted in order to boost or diminish the ratings of listed products and services. These attacks often emanate from a collection of accounts, called Sybils, which are collectively managed by a group of real users. A new advanced scheme, which we term elite Sybil attacks, recruits organically highly-rated accounts to generate seeminglytrustworthy and realistic-looking reviews. These elite Sybil accounts taken together form a large-scale sparsely-knit Sybil network for which existing Sybil fake-review defense systems are unlikely to succeed.