Crowdsourcing Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information via Sina Microblog

Abstract

Since Edward Snowden’s leaks about the scale and scope of US electronic surveillance, it has become apparent that security services are just as fascinating as what they might learn from our data exhaust. At the time, cybercrime is becoming a global threat now. Cybercriminals may engage in criminal activities with personal privacy data from microblog. Identity theft is probably an example. In this paper we examine the characteristics of privacy leakage in microblog and its potential threats to the Internet community. Research found that a large number of privacy information in social network space was leaked unintentionally. Users often share too much significant personal information. Our study found that the accumulated privacy information may bring huge spam into Internet space. We examined over 20 million nodes profile information and extracted the name, location, gender, and email from these nodes profiles. After basic analysis and processing, we shown that all these personal information is enough to launch spam storm or other criminal activities. The result suggests that each node in the microblog should protect its privacy information carefully.

Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.61170209,61370132;Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University No.NCET-13-0676; Shenzhen strategic emerging industry development funds Grant No.JCYJ20120821162230172; Guangdong Natural Science Foundation Grant No. S2013040012895, Foundation for Distinguished Young Talents in Higher Education of Guangdong, China, Grant No. 2013LYM_0076, the Major Fundamental Research Project in the Science and Technology Plan of Shenzhen Grant No. JCYJ2013032910203205.