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Using fake reviews to find dangerous extensions

krebsonsecurity.com

1–10 of 105 posts

Re: Using fake reviews to find dangerous extensions

#3
post #2

Reviews are mathematical garbage even there are real reviewers because we all have different expectations and it varies completely across cultures and geographies.

Maybe this signal (fake reviews => fraudulent products) is the most useful info reviews provide.

Re: Using fake reviews to find dangerous extensions

#5

I'm surprised anyone ever installs browser extensions, given how many malicious extensions exist, and how intrusive they are whether malicious or not.

Everyone's use case is different. There are definitely a lot of very useful extensions available.

Re: Using fake reviews to find dangerous extensions

#6

I'm surprised anyone ever installs browser extensions, given how many malicious extensions exist, and how intrusive they are whether malicious or not.

Ublock origin and https everywhere improved security by removing deceptive advertisements masquerading as legitimate on search engines and freeware download sites. https everywhere prevented some forms of https downgrade attacks. Also ublock has an option to remove webrtc IP leaking.

Re: Using fake reviews to find dangerous extensions

#7
Coming soon: consulting firm uses this technique to build a training set of fraudulent reviews, builds review fraud detector that doesn't take metadata into account and discriminates against elderly people and non-Western reviewers.

In all seriousness, this is a really interesting technique. Maybe there are analogues for other fake/bot behavior in other contexts.

Re: Using fake reviews to find dangerous extensions

#8
post #2

Reviews are mathematical garbage even there are real reviewers because we all have different expectations and it varies completely across cultures and geographies.

Reviews are subjective and qualitative data. Math deals with objective and quantitative data. It’s no surprise that shoehorning the former into the latter is a highly non-trivial problem, that even the best minds in the tech industry struggle to solve for their use cases.

Re: Using fake reviews to find dangerous extensions

#9
post #2

Reviews are mathematical garbage even there are real reviewers because we all have different expectations and it varies completely across cultures and geographies.

I once watched a movie where the rating was "do you like the item on the left more than on the right". I'm not sure if it is mathematically possible to create a rank from it. I assume, that new items appear and have less comparisons than others.
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