Exploiting social networking sites for spam

In this work we present our friend-in-the-middle attacks on SNSs and how it can be used to harvest social data in an automated fashion. This social data can then be exploited for large-scale attacks such as context-aware spam and social-phishing. We prove the feasibility of our attack exemplary on Facebook and estimate the impact based upon a simulation on a regional network of Facebook. Alarmingly, all major SNSs are vulnerable to our attack as they fail to secure the network layer appropriately.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Marcus Huber, Martin Mulazzani, Edgar Weippl, Gerhard Kitzler, Sigrun Goluch
• Keywords: CCS 2010, Context-aware Spam, Large-scale Attacks, Security Privacy, Social Data