Day of the Week Twitter Phishing Impact

Abstract

Phishing has become ever more prevalent in everyday life with new attacks and attempts being made every hour of every day. Twitter has been a major social media player for many years now and continues to deal with phishing in every post. Phishing attempts are harmful to every user and currently most individuals cannot identify a phishing tweet, nor accept appropriately and avoid them in their entirety. Our original hypothesis was that the day of the week would impact the number and frequency of phishing attempts. We created a Python-based program, in conjunction with the Python Module of Tweepy to catch posts to Twitter over a two-week period of July 2nd to July 15th. The data was then processed through ScrapeBox to identify phishing tweets with Google Safe Browsing API. The results were then identified by date, time, day of the week, and specific post URL. From there, another Python Module called Pandas was used to manage the over 8 billion twitter posts as well as gather statistical information about our data to find a statistically significant aspect. Conclusions were drawn based on the influence of the day of the week which lead us to our conclusion about Twitter phishing attempts throughout the week and including holidays.