Computer science professor receives funding to detect misinformation on social networks

Professor Xu Yuan of our School of Computing and Informatics received a $175,000 grant from the National Sciences Foundation, Empowering Elastic-honeypot as Real-time Malicious Content Sniffers for Social Networks, to detect spam messages, misinformation, disinformation and outright fraud on social networks. To separate out such malicious content from benign and useful content and protect social networks, there is a need for robust content classification systems. However, before such systems can be designed, there is a need for data that train the classifiers. Honeypots are a good way to obtain such data about malicious attacker behavior. This project develops a novel and lightweight honeypot-based malicious content sniffing system, named the elastic-honeypot sniffer, to overcome drawbacks in conventional honeypot-based solutions.