Generating unfair ratings to attack online rating systems

Abstract

Online rating systems such as those from eBay or Amazon are created for users to provide their honest opinions on an item and for others to use this valuable information to influence their decision on the item. Given that the opinions that users have on an item may vary, malicious users may be able to exploit this vulnerability by performing bad-mouthing to degrade the quality of an item or to perform promoting to increase the quality of an item. This would in turn affect the consumer’s decision on that item since the opinions given by the malicious users are inaccurate. Therefore it is important that a study is to be done on the different attack behaviours of malicious users on these online ratings systems. The study would determine the performance of the attack behaviour based on its effectiveness against a defence mechanism and the efficiency of the attack.