Detection of Compromised Online Social Network Account with an Enhanced Knn

The primary threat to online social network (OSN) users is account compromisation. The challenge in detecting a compromised account is due to the trusted relationship established between the account owners, their friends, and the service providers. The available research which focuses on using machine learning has limitations with human experts involved in feature selection and a standardized dataset. The paper discusses users` various behaviors of users of OSN and the up-to-date approaches in detecting a compromised OSN account with emphasis on the limitations and challenges. Furthermore, we propose an enhanced machine learning approach Word Embedding and KNN (WE-KNN), which addresses the limitations faced by the previous techniques used. We detailed our proposed WE-KNN for feature extraction, selection of behavior of OSN users, and classification. Our proposed model is evaluated using the standard benchmark datasets, namely KDD Cup ‘99 and NSL-KDD and implemented it in WEKA. Besides, we used state-of-the-art evaluation metrics to assess the performance of our model. The results obtained depicts that the proposed approach in compromise account detection performs better.