Information Attacks on Online Social Networks

Security Threats Associated With Social Media

Nowadays, online social networks involve people from the entire world, of any age and with any kind of education. They also helped to increase computer usage among categories that previously showed little interest for it (Stroud, 2008). The users of information systems have various types of security requirements, including: confidentiality, integrity, accountability, availability and anonymity. The same security requirements can be applied to social networking platforms, as well.

Unfortunately, while most users are aware that their profile and the information they publish is essentially public, they usually strengthen their privacy settings only after problems arise and tend to overlook the actual impact of the information they disclose (Stroud, 2008). Apparently harmless information can be exploited, and the more information the attacker has, the more severe and sophisticated the attack can be. For example, name, location and age can be used to connect a profile to a real-world identity for more than half of the residents in the USA (Irani et al., 2011).

In fact, social networking platforms are susceptible to different types of attacks, targeting different components, conducted from different domains, using different techniques. For better analysing these attacks, it is useful to identify the main abstract components of a generic social networking platform, corresponding to different functional aspects of those systems. Attackers can target each of the different components, or they can target different levels, possibly with roughly the same logic. We identify four main components: