Serf and Turf: Crowdturfing for Fun and Profit

TL;DR

This paper investigates crowdturfing systems that organize malicious crowd-sourcing campaigns, revealing their rapid growth, operational structures, and significant threat to online communities through detailed measurements and active testing.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of crowdturfing platforms, including size, structure, campaign effectiveness, and international worker sources, highlighting their threat to Internet security.

Findings

Crowdturfing systems are rapidly growing in user base and revenue.

Campaigns on these platforms are highly effective at reaching and influencing users.

Crowdturfing poses a significant threat to online communities worldwide.

Abstract

Popular Internet services in recent years have shown that remarkable things can be achieved by harnessing the power of the masses using crowd-sourcing systems. However, crowd-sourcing systems can also pose a real challenge to existing security mechanisms deployed to protect Internet services. Many of these techniques make the assumption that malicious activity is generated automatically by machines, and perform poorly or fail if users can be organized to perform malicious tasks using crowd-sourcing systems. Through measurements, we have found surprising evidence showing that not only do malicious crowd-sourcing systems exist, but they are rapidly growing in both user base and total revenue. In this paper, we describe a significant effort to study and understand these "crowdturfing" systems in today's Internet. We use detailed crawls to extract data about the size and operational structure of these crowdturfing systems. We analyze details of campaigns offered and performed in these sites, and evaluate their end-to-end effectiveness by running active, non-malicious campaigns of our own. Finally, we study and compare the source of workers on crowdturfing sites in different countries. Our results suggest that campaigns on these systems are highly effective at reaching users, and their continuing growth poses a concrete threat to online communities such as social networks, both in the US and elsewhere.