  As a prominent instance of vandalism edits, Wiki search poisoning for illicit
promotion is a cybercrime in which the adversary aims at editing Wiki articles
to promote illicit businesses through Wiki search results of relevant queries.
In this paper, we report a study that, for the first time, shows that such
stealthy blackhat SEO on Wiki can be automated. Our technique, called MAWSEO,
employs adversarial revisions to achieve real-world cybercriminal objectives,
including rank boosting, vandalism detection evasion, topic relevancy, semantic
consistency, user awareness (but not alarming) of promotional content, etc. Our
evaluation and user study demonstrate that MAWSEO is capable of effectively and
efficiently generating adversarial vandalism edits, which can bypass
state-of-the-art built-in Wiki vandalism detectors, and also get promotional
content through to Wiki users without triggering their alarms. In addition, we
investigated potential defense, including coherence based detection and
adversarial training of vandalism detection, against our attack in the Wiki
ecosystem.
