Blackmarket-driven Collusion on Online Media: A Survey

Online media platforms have enabled users to connect with individuals, organizations, and share their thoughts. Other than connectivity, these platforms also serve multiple purposes - education, promotion, updates, awareness, etc. Increasing the reputation of individuals in online media (aka Social growth) is thus essential these days, particularly for business owners and event managers who are looking to improve their publicity and sales. The natural way of gaining social growth is a tedious task, which leads to the creation of unfair ways to boost the reputation of individuals artificially. Several online blackmarket services have developed thriving ecosystem with lucrative offers to attract content promoters for publicizing their content online. These services are operated in such a way that most of their inorganic activities are being unnoticed by the media authorities, and the customers of the blackmarket services are less likely to be spotted. We refer to such unfair ways of bolstering social reputation in online media as collusion. This survey is the first attempt to provide readers a comprehensive outline of the latest studies dealing with the identification and analysis of blackmarket-driven collusion in online media. We present a broad overview of the problem, definitions of the related problems and concepts, the taxonomy of the proposed approaches, description of the publicly available datasets and online tools, and discuss the outstanding issues. We believe that collusive entity detection is a newly emerging topic in anomaly detection and cyber-security research in general and the current survey will provide readers with an easy-to-access and comprehensive list of methods, tools and resources proposed so far for detecting and analyzing collusive entities on online media.