Devaluing Stocks With Adversarially Crafted Retweets

A joint research collaboration between US universities and IBM has formulated a proof-of-concept adversarial attack that's theoretically capable of causing stock market losses, simply by changing one word in a retweet of a Twitter post. In one experiment, the researchers were able to hobble the Stocknet prediction model with two methods: a manipulation attack and a concatenation attack. The attack surface for an adversarial attack on automated and machine learning stock prediction systems is that a growing number of them are relying on organic social media as predictors of performance; and that manipulating this'in-the-wild' data is a process that can, potentially, be reliably formulated. Besides Twitter, systems of this nature ingest data from Reddit, StockTwits, and Yahoo News, among others. The difference between Twitter and the other sources is that retweets are editable, even if the original tweets are not.