HNGlance

Top Best New Show

4.5M Fake Stars in GitHub: Popularity Contests, Scams, and Malware [pdf]

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13459

by caust1c • 2 years ago

4 2 2 years ago

AR

Related Stories

Loading related stories...

Comments

2

mentalgear2• 2 years ago

"We find that: (1) fake-star-related activities have rapidly surged since 2024; (2) the user profile characteristics of fake stargazers are not distinct from average GitHub users, but many of them have highly abnormal activity patterns; (3) the majority of fake stars are used to promote short-lived malware repositories masquerading as pirating software, game cheats, or cryptocurrency bots; (4) some repositories may have acquired fake stars for growth hacking"

mentalgear2• 2 years ago

"StarScout, a scalable tool able to detect anomalous starring behaviors"

can be found here: https://github.com/hehao98/StarScout

Source preview

arxiv.org

HNGlance

© 2024-2026 HN Glance. Story content belongs to its original sources.

Privacy
Terms