Security Issues with Social Networking Sites

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Some attacking strategies performed by the attackers are described as follows:

- CBIR (Content based Image Retrieval)

This is an attacking strategy which is done to know current location of the users. Attackers can know the location of the users by the status of the user and also by tracking the image and video pattern as well (Huber et al., 2010).

- Click jacking

This is type of attack where attackers send video or pictures to the users profile and when user click on the links, malicious actions are performed. This is very common in Facebook, when a user likes a page, a picture or a video the user is trapped by the attackers (Gunatilaka, 2011).

- Neighborhood Attack

In this strategy, attacker uses the friends of the victim to get to user. Attacker knows victims neighborhood and uses information from these contacts to use your profile and to perform cyber attack. This is very common is Facebook.

- Watering Hole

This attacking technique is very high skilled and is done not to retrieve information about the users of social networking sites but to hack the system and site developers programs. In January 2013, the attackers used this approach to Facebook. The attackers hacked a mobile developer forum and when developers visited the forum their system got infected with a MAC Trojan (Kumar et al., 2013).

Conclusion

In a nutshell, despite of huge popularity and public interests, Social networking sites (SNSs) holds great security risks. The rise in incidents of cyber attacks tells us that social networks and their billions of users have to do a lot more to protect themselves from organized cybercrime. Keeping our system clean and updated, Analyzing the content thoroughly before doing anything stupid , knowledge about how people are fooled through these sites and limiting the information that we share in these portals may help to reduce consequences and attacking by attackers. This paper highlighted some of the security concerns of using Social networking sites (SNSs) that are to be considered.

References

Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230.

Rajam, S. T. R., & Kumar, S. B. R. (2014). Security and Privacy issues in Social Network Services: An Overview. International Journal of Innovative Research in Electrical, Electronics, Instrumentation and Control Engineering 2014, IJIREEICE, 2.

Obiniyi, A. A., Oyelade, O. N., & Obiniyi, P. (2014). Social Network and Security Issues: Mitigating Threat through Reliable Security Model. International Journal of Computer Applications, 103(9).

Vanheuangdy, V. (2010). Security Threats of Web 2.0 and Social Networking Sites, Retreived from http://uwcisa.uwaterloo.ca/Biblio2/Topic/ACC626%20Security%20Threats%20of%20Web%202%20and%20SNS%20V%20Vanheuangdy.pdf

Lang, M., Devitt, J., Kelly, S., Kinneen, A., O'Malley, J., & Prunty, D. (2009, September). Social networking and personal data security: a study of attitudes and public awareness in Ireland. In Management of e-Commerce and e-Government, 2009. ICMECG'09. International Conference on (pp. 486-490). IEEE.

Kumar, A., Gupta, S. K., Rai, A. K., & Sinha, S. (2013). Social networking sites and their security issues. International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, 3(4), 1-5.

Markus Huber, Martin Mulazzani, Edgar Weippl “Social Networking Sites Security: Quo Vadis” IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust.

Gunatilaka, D. (2011). A survey of privacy and security issues in social networks. In Proceedings of the 27th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications. Washington: IEEE Computer Society.

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