Tweets containing malicious links are more likely to contain negative emotions, and It is the content of the tweet that increases the likelihood that it will be liked and shared., as researchers at Cardiff University have demonstrated for the first time.
He new study has been published in the magazine ACM Transactions on the Web.
Malicious tweets
As part of the study, the team analyzed a random sample of around 275,000 from a corpus of over 3.5 million tweets which were sent during seven major sporting events: the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the 2015 and 2016 Superbowl, the 2015 Cricket World Cup, the 2015 Rugby World Cup, the UEFA EURO 2016 and the 2016 Olympic Games.
The team identified 105,642 tweets containing malicious URLs and 169,178 tweets containing benign URLs from this data set, and then used sophisticated computer models to estimate how these tweets survived on the platform 24 hours after the sporting event.
Tweets that were classified as benign were more likely to spread if a user had a large number of followers and the tweet contained positive emotions such as “team,” “love,” “happy,” “enjoyment,” and “fun.”
However, the results showed that malicious tweets were not strongly associated with the number of followers of the poster and were more likely to spread when the content of the tweet contained negative emotions. Tweets reflecting fear were 114% more likely to be retweeted, with words like “kill,” “fight,” “shoot,” and “controversy” regularly included in tweets containing malicious URLs.
Cybercriminals are increasingly using this method, known as a “drive-by download attack,” to hide a malicious URL in an attractive tweet and use it as click bait to lure users to a malicious web page.
The study suggests that the results show that even with Twitter's security measures, malicious URLs can still go undetected and that this gap is large enough to expose millions of users to malware in a short period of time.
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The news
Tweets containing malicious links are more likely to contain negative emotions
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.