West, A.G., Chang, J., Venkatasubramanian, K., Sokolsky, O., and Lee, I. (2011).
Link Spamming Wikipedia for Profit. In CEAS '11: Proceedings of the Eighth 
Annual Collaboration, Electronic Messaging, Anti-Abuse, and Spam Conference,
pp. 152--161, Perth, AUS. September 2011. (co-Best Paper Award).


Abstract: Collaborative functionality is an increasingly prevalent web 
technology. To encourage participation, these systems usually have low 
barriers-to-entry and permissive privileges. Unsurprisingly, ill-intentioned 
users try to leverage these characteristics for nefarious purposes. In this 
work, a particular abuse is examined -- link spamming -- the addition of 
promotional or otherwise inappropriate hyperlinks.

Our analysis focuses on the wiki model and the collaborative encyclopedia, 
Wikipedia, in particular. A principal goal of spammers is to maximize 
*exposure*, the quantity of people who view a link. Creating and analyzing 
the first Wikipedia link spam corpus, we find that existing spam strategies 
perform quite poorly in this regard. The status quo spamming model relies on 
link persistence to accumulate exposures, a strategy that fails given the 
diligence of the Wikipedia community. Instead, we propose a model that 
exploits the latency inherent in human anti-spam enforcement.

Statistical estimation suggests our novel model would produce significantly 
more link exposures than status quo techniques. More critically, the strategy 
could prove economically viable for perpetrators, incentivizing its 
exploitation. To this end, we address mitigation strategies.