TY - GEN
T1 - AppWatcher
T2 - 8th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, WiSec 2015
AU - Xie, Zhen
AU - Zhu, Sencun
PY - 2015/6/22
Y1 - 2015/6/22
N2 - Driven by huge monetary reward, some mobile application (app) developers turn to the underground market to buy positive reviews instead of doing legal advertisements. These promotion reviews are either directly posted in app stores like iTunes and Google Play, or published on some popular websites that have many app users. Until now, a clear understanding of this app promotion underground market is still lacking. In this work, we focus on unveiling this underground market and statistically analyzing the promotion incentives, characteristics of promoted apps and suspicious reviewers. To collect promoted apps, we built an automatic data collection system, AppWatcher, which monitored 52 paid review service providers for four months and crawled all the app metadata from their corresponding app stores. Finally, AppWatcher exposes 645 apps promoted in app stores and 29, 680 apps promoted in some popular websites. The current underground market is then reported from various perspectives (e.g., service price, app volume). We identified some interesting features of both promoted apps and suspicious reviewers, which are significantly different from those of randomly chosen apps. Finally, we built a simple tracer to narrow down the suspect list of promoted apps in the underground market.
AB - Driven by huge monetary reward, some mobile application (app) developers turn to the underground market to buy positive reviews instead of doing legal advertisements. These promotion reviews are either directly posted in app stores like iTunes and Google Play, or published on some popular websites that have many app users. Until now, a clear understanding of this app promotion underground market is still lacking. In this work, we focus on unveiling this underground market and statistically analyzing the promotion incentives, characteristics of promoted apps and suspicious reviewers. To collect promoted apps, we built an automatic data collection system, AppWatcher, which monitored 52 paid review service providers for four months and crawled all the app metadata from their corresponding app stores. Finally, AppWatcher exposes 645 apps promoted in app stores and 29, 680 apps promoted in some popular websites. The current underground market is then reported from various perspectives (e.g., service price, app volume). We identified some interesting features of both promoted apps and suspicious reviewers, which are significantly different from those of randomly chosen apps. Finally, we built a simple tracer to narrow down the suspect list of promoted apps in the underground market.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84962040494&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84962040494&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2766498.2766510
DO - 10.1145/2766498.2766510
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84962040494
T3 - Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, WiSec 2015
BT - Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, WiSec 2015
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 22 June 2015 through 26 June 2015
ER -