Dangerous Detection Applications Facebook

Abstract

With 20 million installs a day, third-party apps are a major reason for the popularity and addictiveness of Facebook. Unfortunately, hackers have realized the potential of using apps for spreading malware and spam. The problem is already significant, as we find that at least 13% of apps in our dataset are malicious. So far, the research community has focused on detecting malicious posts and campaigns. In this paper, we ask the question: Given a Facebook application, can we determine if it is malicious? Our key contribution is in developing FRAppE—Facebook’s Rigorous Application Evaluator—arguably the first tool focused on detecting malicious apps on Facebook. To develop FRAppE, we use information gathered by observing the posting behavior of 111K Facebook apps seen across 2.2 million users on Facebook.