Published August 30, 2025 | Version 1.0.0
Software Open

Replication Package for "Six Million (Suspected) Fake Stars on GitHub: A Growing Spiral of Popularity Contests, Spams, and Malware"

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Carnegie Mellon University
  • 2. Socket Inc
  • 3. ROR icon North Carolina State University

Description

This Zenodo record contains the source code of StarScout, a tool to find suspicious (and possibly faked) GitHub stars at-scale. It also contains data and scripts to replicate results from the following paper:
Hao He, Haoqin Yang, Philipp Burckhardt, Alexandros Kapravelos, Bogdan Vasilescu, and Christian Kästner. 2026. Six Million (Suspected) Fake Stars on GitHub: A Growing Spiral of Popularity Contests, Spam, and Malware. In 2026 IEEE/ACM 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE ’26), April 12–18, 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3744916.3764531
 
Refer to the README file inside StarScout.zip for more information about the files in this record.

Files

mongodb.zip

Files (5.8 GB)

Name Size Download all
md5:fa1ec0d205e262c94b63bd502b5dfa76
5.6 GB Preview Download
md5:6aef7c7300991639863ec050036078e2
164.3 MB Preview Download

Additional details

Software

Repository URL
https://github.com/hehao98/StarScout