Alternative Forms

• Fake Account

• Fake User

• Fraudulent Entity

• Malicious Account

• Zombie User

Definitions

Definition 1

A zombie account is a fake digital identity that is controlled by an unauthorized entity.

It may be controlled:

• programmatically by software,

• and/or manually by people.

The entity controlling the fake digital identity is called the zombie account manager.

Zombie accounts may typically proliferate on systems such as social networks where subscription is opened to a large audience, where identities are not centrally verified and where zombie account managers may find an interest.

The motivations of zombie account managers comprise:

• Financial

• Political / ideological

• Other

The actions of zombie accounts comprise:

• Engaging in social engineering as part of a larger attack

• Masquerading praise (e.g. likes, comments, etc.) to promote deals, products, services, brands or ideas

• Masquerading criticism (e.g. dislikes, comments, etc.) to suppress deals, products, services, brands or ideas

The consequences of zombie accounts comprise:

• Disinformation

• Fraud

• Larger attack

The detection of zombie accounts is difficult, function of the sophistication of their management by the zombie account manager. In effect, zombie account managers tend to continuously adapt their techniques to avoid detection which ends up in a cat-and-mouse game.

The countermeasures that may mitigate zombie accounts comprise:

• Acceptable use policy

• Account behavior data analytics

• Captchas

• Identity certification / verification

• Social honeypots

Samples

Alice was successfully selling amazing widgets on the Internet. Bob was less successful because his widgets were less praised by online customers than Alice’s. He hired Eve on a dark web forum to help him destroy Alice’s business. Eve created a set of zombie accounts on social networks. She then used these fake persona to criticize Alice’s widgets. Sadly, Alice’s sales dropped as people lost confidence in the quality of her products.

Conceptual Diagram

Open

Definition 2

 A zombie account is an identity that remains active after an employee left a company.

Definition 3

A zombie account is an identity that has not been used for an extensive period of time.

Related Terms

Quotes

Bibliography

• Deng et al., 2015

• Deng et al., 2016

• Greenberg et al., 2017

• Powell, 2009

• Wu et al., 2013

• Zhang et al., 2019

See Also

• Zombie