Defending against large-scale crawls in online social networks
Mainack Mondal, Bimal Viswanath, Allen Clement, Peter Druschel, Krishna P. Gummadi, Alan Mislove, Ansley Post · 2012
Thwarting large-scale crawls of user profiles in online social networks (OSNs) like Facebook and Renren is in the interest of both the users and the operators of these sites. OSN users wish to maintain control over their personal information, and OSN operators wish to protect their business assets and reputation. Existing rate-limiting techniques are ineffective against crawlers with many accounts, be they fake accounts (also known as Sybils) or compromised accounts of real users obtained on the black market.