Goodbye Cloaking? (14)

"Cloak and Spammer: Facebook Beefs Up AI to Stop Black Hat Pages From Covering Their Tracks"

From http://adage.com/article/digital/fac...ammers/310070/
By Garett Sloane

Facebook says it is intensifying its efforts to control scams and fake news by taking a harder line on "cloaking," a tactic that bad actors use across the web to avoid detection.

"We've recently been ramping up our enforcement," says Rob Leathern, Facebook product management director. "We are making it clear: We don't tolerate cloaking."

Cloaking is a longtime but straightforward practice of so-called black hats online. Fraudulent marketers, pornographers and even racists have used it to disguise their true nature in search results and in social feeds.

Facebook was already seeking out links on its platform to landing pages that don't deliver what was promised, serve deceptive ads or have too many ads. Possible penalities included warnings, lower visibility for links and outright bans from the platform.

Some of the more elaborate cloaking efforts, however, are tough to recognize. One method is to show Facebook one version of a site to gain approval, then serve something different when Facebook users arrive.

"For example, they will set up web pages so that when a Facebook reviewer clicks a link to check whether it's consistent with our policies, they are taken to a different web page than when someone using the Facebook app clicks that same link," Leathern wrote in a blog post Wednesday. "Cloaked destination pages, which frequently include diet pills, pornography and muscle building scams, create negative and disruptive experiences for people."

The company says it has beefed up both human reviews and its artificial intelligence algorithms to spot cloaking. "In the past few months these new steps have resulted in us taking down thousands of these offenders and disrupting their economic incentives for misleading people," Leathern wrote.

Widespread phenomenon

Jessie Daniels, a professor of sociology at Hunter College-City University of New York, has studied cloaking since the 1990s, and says it's very much mixed in with the problems of false news and racist propaganda propagating on the web.

Cloaking is often done by "someone who is concealing authorship in order to disguise a political agenda," Daniels says.

She points to search results from a query as simple as "Martin Luther King." The first page of Google results includes the site martinlutherking.org, which promises "historical trivia, articles and pictures" in "a valuable resource for teachers and students alike." The site is actually run by the racist group Stormfront.

"The thing I look at are people who are politically motivated and people close behind them who are profit-motivated," Daniels says. "It's always the pornographers and white supremacists."
Stopping cloaking will be difficult for any company, even Facebook, Daniels adds. In the end, it takes a lot of human reviews. Facebook has recently hired 3,000 people to comb the site for objectionable videos, but it wouldn't say how many people are dedicated to cloaking patrol.

Originally Posted by shishev

"Cloak and Spammer: Facebook Beefs Up AI to Stop Black Hat Pages From Covering Their Tracks"

From http://adage.com/article/digital/fac...ammers/310070/
By Garett Sloane

Facebook says it is intensifying its efforts to control scams and fake news by taking a harder line on "cloaking," a tactic that bad actors use across the web to avoid detection.

"We've recently been ramping up our enforcement," says Rob Leathern, Facebook product management director. "We are making it clear: We don't tolerate cloaking."

Cloaking is a longtime but straightforward practice of so-called black hats online. Fraudulent marketers, pornographers and even racists have used it to disguise their true nature in search results and in social feeds.

Facebook was already seeking out links on its platform to landing pages that don't deliver what was promised, serve deceptive ads or have too many ads. Possible penalities included warnings, lower visibility for links and outright bans from the platform.

Some of the more elaborate cloaking efforts, however, are tough to recognize. One method is to show Facebook one version of a site to gain approval, then serve something different when Facebook users arrive.

"For example, they will set up web pages so that when a Facebook reviewer clicks a link to check whether it's consistent with our policies, they are taken to a different web page than when someone using the Facebook app clicks that same link," Leathern wrote in a blog post Wednesday. "Cloaked destination pages, which frequently include diet pills, pornography and muscle building scams, create negative and disruptive experiences for people."

The company says it has beefed up both human reviews and its artificial intelligence algorithms to spot cloaking. "In the past few months these new steps have resulted in us taking down thousands of these offenders and disrupting their economic incentives for misleading people," Leathern wrote.

Widespread phenomenon

Jessie Daniels, a professor of sociology at Hunter College-City University of New York, has studied cloaking since the 1990s, and says it's very much mixed in with the problems of false news and racist propaganda propagating on the web.

Cloaking is often done by "someone who is concealing authorship in order to disguise a political agenda," Daniels says.

She points to search results from a query as simple as "Martin Luther King." The first page of Google results includes the site martinlutherking.org, which promises "historical trivia, articles and pictures" in "a valuable resource for teachers and students alike." The site is actually run by the racist group Stormfront.

"The thing I look at are people who are politically motivated and people close behind them who are profit-motivated," Daniels says. "It's always the pornographers and white supremacists."
Stopping cloaking will be difficult for any company, even Facebook, Daniels adds. In the end, it takes a lot of human reviews. Facebook has recently hired 3,000 people to comb the site for objectionable videos, but it wouldn't say how many people are dedicated to cloaking patrol.

Originally Posted by cmdeal

I suppose this was inevitable ... I am just surprised it took them so long.

Originally Posted by matuloo

Indeed, now let's see how much success they will actually have with their efforts ... cloaking and plenty of other black-hat methods is as old as internet alone

Do you guys think they just about to start or have been working on this recently already? So far all is going well, but question is how long?

So they never banned for cloaking till now?

This is a public relations stunt and isn't anything new they are just following googles lead these days, as fb has took it on the chin for being slow to react to bad content cloaked or non cloaked....

^^ What he said.

Just seems like they need to release some "progress" to the public.

I agree with polar and Mr Green.... It's PR.... A bit like Donald Trump vs. Kim Jong-un

How we fought bad ads, sites and scammers in 2016 - Google

"To fight cloakers, we take down the scammers themselves, and prevent them from advertising with us again. In 2016, we suspended more than 1,300 accounts for tabloid cloaking. Unfortunately, this type of bad ad is gaining in popularity because people are clicking on them. And a handful of scammers can pump out a lot of bad ads: During a single sweep for tabloid cloaking in December 2016, we took down 22 cloakers that were responsible for ads seen more than 20 million times by people online in a single week."

https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/...s-in-2016.html

There's no doubt in my mind that FB has always had the resources and know-how to stop blackhat camps.

However, blackhat camps must have generated significant amounts of revenue for them - which is the ultimate goal of most businesses.

Positive user-experience though needs to be top priority to ensure longevity of the business - so a balance needs to be maintained.

As more and more people ran blackhat, more and more FB users were riled up, causing FB to have to restore balance by cracking down on blackhat practices.

I still hear of people doing insane amounts of revenue running blackhat on FB, but I have a feeling their good days are numbered. It would seem that for long-term survival on FB, running whitehat is the way to go.



Amy

One obvious newer threat for cloakers is /are Machine Learning approaches.

Human review is time-limited - but ML isn't limited in the same way.

I don't know enough about the technicalities of cloaking/anti-cloaking to know for sure, but I'd guess that cloak-detection is a pretty good fit for learning algorithms of various kinds.

@caurmen, totally agree. If it weren't for AI / ML algorithms, I'd think it was more of a PR stunt. AI has already been successfully deployed to detect anomalies in various forms. As long as there's good data to frame the problem around and strong data scientists / AI engineers, there's a good chance AI can solve it, and FB has both in abundance.

We (AVID) are starting to see an increase back to display as Facebook is becoming more competitive and cpms are going up.

I'd say the storm is over :P