mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MAWSEO: Adversarial Wiki Search Poisoning for Illicit Online Promotion

arXiv 2304.11300 ↗First posted 22 Apr 2023cs.CR cs.AI cs.IRcited by 7

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Abstract (arXiv)

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.

Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 25 of its 86 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2023.

Builds on

25 of 86 references.

References · 25

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13 more
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Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 3; 2025: 3; 2026: 1.

7 papers.

  1. 2025FlippedRAG: Black-Box Opinion Manipulation Adversarial Attacks to Retrieval-Augmented Generation Modelscited by 24
  2. 2025Collapse of Dense Retrievers: Short, Early, and Literal Biases Outranking Factual Evidencecited by 16
  3. 2026Overcoming the Retrieval Barrier: Indirect Prompt Injection in the Wild for LLM Systemscited by 16
  4. 2024Robust Neural Information Retrieval: An Adversarial and Out-of-distribution Perspectivecited by 15
  5. 2024Rag and Roll: An End-to-End Evaluation of Indirect Prompt Manipulations in LLM-based Application Frameworkscited by 14
  6. 2024Black-Box Opinion Manipulation Attacks to Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Modelscited by 11
  7. 2025Injecting Falsehoods: Adversarial Man-in-the-Middle Attacks Undermining Factual Recall in LLMscited by 1