From Sophistication to Coordination: Decoding the Next Generation of Social Bot Behaviour and Detection
Salil Kanhere, UNSW Sydney, Australia
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Michael McGuire, Department of Sociology, Surrey Centre for Cyber Security, University of Surrey, United Kingdom
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Pierangela Samarati, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
From Sophistication to Coordination: Decoding the Next Generation of Social Bot Behaviour and Detection
Salil Kanhere
UNSW Sydney
Australia
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Brief Bio
Salil Kanhere is a Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney, Australia. His research interests span cybersecurity, mobile computing, IoT, blockchain, and applied machine learning. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed articles and is leading several government and industry-funded research projects in these areas. He received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award (2020) and the Humboldt Research Fellowship (2014) from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, and has received 12 Best Paper Awards. He is an ACM Distinguished Member, an IEEE Senior Member, and an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor. He serves on the advisory board of three SMEs and has held visiting positions at RWTH Aachen, I2R Singapore, Technical University Darmstadt, the University of Zurich, and Graz University of Technology. Salil is the Editor in Chief of the Ad Hoc Networks journal and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, Computer Communications, and Pervasive and Mobile Computing. He has served on the organising committees of several IEEE/ACM international conferences and is a steering committee member for IEEE LCN and IEEE ICBC. Salil has also co-authored two books.
Abstract
Social bots have advanced into highly sophisticated actors within online ecosystems, shaping public discussion, spreading misinformation, and carrying out coordinated deceptive campaigns on an unprecedented scale. Driven by the rising threat of covert and adaptable bot operations, this talk brings together two complementary investigations into the behaviour and detection of these entities. The first study introduces BotSSCL, a self-supervised contrastive learning framework that identifies highly human-like bots by leveraging social network-inspired contrastive objectives to enhance separability in the embedding space. BotSSCL produces robust, generalisable representations, surpassing current state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised benchmarks by up to 6–8% in F1 performance. The second study, TBTrackerX, provides a measurement-based approach to trigger-based (TB) bot campaigns—automated agents that activate in response to specific keywords to partake in deceptive financial or illicit interactions. Our large-scale analysis reveals a coordinated TB ecosystem characterised by contextual reactions, intermittent temporal activity, and strategic dormancy designed to evade detection. Together, these investigations offer a comprehensive view of how advanced bots operate and how they can be countered, emphasising the urgent need for adaptive, resilient, and trustworthy detection strategies in today’s dynamic social media landscapes.
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Michael McGuire
Department of Sociology, Surrey Centre for Cyber Security, University of Surrey
United Kingdom
Brief Bio
Available Soon
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Pierangela Samarati
Università degli Studi di Milano
Italy
http://www.di.unimi.it/samarati
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Brief Bio
Pierangela Samarati is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. Her main research interests are on data and applications security and privacy, especially in emerging scenarios. She has participated in several EU-funded projects involving different aspects of information protection, also serving as project coordinator. She has published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles in international journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters. She has been Computer Scientist in the Computer Science Laboratory at SRI, CA (USA). She has been a visiting researcher at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University, CA (USA), and at the Center for Secure Information Systems of George Mason University, VA (USA). She is the chair of the IEEE Systems Council Technical Committee on Security and Privacy in Complex Information Systems (TCSPCIS), of the ERCIM Security and Trust Management Working Group (STM), and of the ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES). She is a member of several steering committees. She is IEEE Fellow (2012), ACM Fellow (2021), IFIP Fellow (2021). She has received the ESORICS Outstanding Research Award (2018), the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2016), and the IFIP WG 11.3 Outstanding Research Award (2012), and the IFIP TC11 Kristian Beckman Award (2008).