Reverse Social Engineering Attacks in Online Social Networks

Social networks are some of the largest and fastest growing online services today. Facebook, for example, has been ranked as the second most visited site on the Internet, and has been reporting growth rates as high as 3% per week. One of the key features of social networks is the support they provide for finding new friends. For example, social network sites may try to automatically identify which users know each other in order to propose friendship recommendations. Clearly, most social network sites are critical with respect to user’s security and privacy due to the large amount of information available on them, as well as their very large user base. Previous research has shown that users of online social networks tend to exhibit a higher degree of trust in friend requests and messages sent by other users. Even though the problem of unsolicited messages in social networks (i.e., spam) has already been studied in detail, to date, reverse social engineering attacks in social networks...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: DIMVA
• Authors: Danesh Irani, Marco Balduzzi, Davide Balzarotti, Engin Kirda, Calton Pu
• Keywords: Computer Networks, DIMVA 2011, Facebook, Online Social Networks, Social Engineering