Venue attacks in location-based social networks

Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs), such as Foursquare, Yelp and Facebook Place, have attracted many people, including business owners who use LBSNs to promote their businesses. A physical location is called a venue or a place of interest in an LBSN. Associated with each venue are several attributes, such as its latitude and longitude values, and the discounts/coupons users can use. LBSN users usually tend to trust venues, which is becoming a key focus of various attacks [7, 10]. By manipulating attributes related to venues, however, an attacker can deceive users, compromise their privacy and destroy the reputation of the venues in an LBSN. In this paper, we call the attacks targeting venues as venue attacks. We first investigate and characterize such attacks in Foursquare, Yelp and Facebook Place. We then study what makes such attacks successful and discuss potential defense approaches against these attacks. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to characterize various venue attacks in LBSNs.