Fighting Spam using Clustering and Automated Rule Creation

Fighting Spam using Clustering and Automated Rule Creation

摘要

One of our biggest priorities at Pinterest is keeping Pinners safe, and that includes protecting them from spam. The Trust & Safety team’s goal is not only to catch spam, but to remove it as quickly as possible to minimize Pinner impact.

The goal of spammers is to make money, and the best way to do this is to spam at scale. It’s a numbers game: one million spam emails are much more effective than one spam email. In order to remove spam quickly, we look at common trends in spam attacks to identify suspect behavior.

To achieve the scale required to be effective, spammers must automate their actions, and each of these “attacks” can be thought of as a cluster. Each event within the attack cluster may share some common features, but different clusters will have a different set of common features.

For example, during an attack where a large number of Pins are created, a spammer might point all Pins to the same domain. While the domain may change between attacks, spammers are still trying to direct traffic to the same spam site.

One of our spam mitigation tactics is our rule engine, Guardian, which helps to identify common features in spam attacks.