Skip to main content

Security and Privacy in Online Social Networks

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Handbook of Social Network Technologies and Applications

Abstract

Social Network Services (SNS) are currently drastically revolutionizing the way people interact, thus becoming de facto a predominant service on the web, today.1 The impact of this paradigm change on socioeconomic and technical aspects of collaboration and interaction is comparable to that caused by the deployment of World Wide Web in the 1990s.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. 1.

    This work has partially been funded by IT R&D program of MKE/KEIT under grant number 10035587, DFG FOR 733 (“QuaP2P”), and the EU SOCIALNETS project, grant no 217141.1According to reports, facebook.com. recently surpassed the previously most popular website google.com by both page visits and served bandwidth: http://www.hitwise.com/us/datacenter/main/dashboard-10133.htmlhttp://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_14698296?nclick_check=1.

  2. 2.

    www.facebook.com

  3. 3.

    www.linkedin.com

  4. 4.

    www.orkut.com

  5. 5.

    www.xing.com

  6. 6.

    Several of these attacks have been shown to be successful in the past. A short selection of examples can be found in [5, 9] as well as at http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2007/08/facebook.html and http://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-usa-08/bh-usa-08-archive.html.

  7. 7.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html.

  8. 8.

    http://www.odnoklassniki.ru.

  9. 9.

    http://www.419scam.org/.

  10. 10.

    http://fraudwar.blogspot.com/2009/05/facebook-hack-reveals-trend-in.html.

  11. 11.

    http://www.pcworld.com/article/191716/myspace_user_data_for_sale.html.

  12. 12.

    http://www.123people.com/.

  13. 13.

    http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2005/09/01/a-new-kind-of-fame/.

  14. 14.

    http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090423/full/news.2009.398.html.

  15. 15.

    http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2009/12/facebook.html.

  16. 16.

    http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/fake-facebook-fan-pages/.

  17. 17.

    http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/191847/facebook_users_targeted_in_massive_spam_run.html.

  18. 18.

    http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2009/12/koobface-compels-facebook-victims-to-help-spread-worm-/1.

  19. 19.

    http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/19/facebook-responds-to-massive-phishing-scheme/.

  20. 20.

    http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/174607/twitter_warns_of_new_phishing_attack.html.

  21. 21.

    One incident has been reported for facebook, where a multitude of groups have been fostered under general topics and concertedly renamed to support Silvio Berlusconi, in 2009 http://www.repubblica.it/2009/12/sezioni/politica/giustizia-21/gruppi-facebook/gruppi-facebook.html.

  22. 22.

    http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/off-the-field/Rachel-Uchitel-threatenslawsuit-over-Facebook-defamation/articleshow/5708237.cms.

  23. 23.

    http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Internet/6580.html.

  24. 24.

    http://blogs.bnet.com/businesstips/?p=6786.

  25. 25.

    http://www.civic.moveon.org/pdf/myspace/.

References

  1. Modelling the Real Market Value of Social Networks. http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/23/modeling-the-real-market-value-of-social-networks/, 2008.

  2. danah m. boyd. Facebook’s privacy trainwreck. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14(1):13–20, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  3. A. Avizienis, J.-C. Laprie, B. Randell, and C. Landwehr. Basic concepts and taxonomy of dependable and secure computing. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 1(1):11–33, 2004.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. M. Balduzzi, C. Platzer, T. Holz, E. Kirda, D. Balzarotti, and C. Kruegel. Abusing Social Networks for Automated User Profiling. Research Report RR-10-233, EURECOM, 2010. http://www.iseclab.org/papers/socialabuse-TR.pdf.

  5. L. Bilge, T. Strufe, D. Balzarotti, and E. Kirda. All Your Contacts Are Belong to Us: Automated Identity Theft Attacks on Social Networks. In 18th Intl. World Wide Web Conference, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  6. d. m. boyd and N. B. Ellison. Social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  7. D. Florencio and C. Herley. A Large-Scale Study of Web Password Habits. In 16th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW 2007), pages 657–666. ACM, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  8. R. Gross and A. Acquisti. Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks. In ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, pages 71–80, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  9. T. N. Jagatic, N. A. Johnson, M. Jakobsson, and F. Menczer. Social phishing. Communications of the ACM, 94–100, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  10. A. Mislove, B. Viswanath, K. P. Gummadi, and P. Druschel. You Are Who You Know: Inferring User Profiles in Online Social Networks. In ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2010), pages 251–260. ACM, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  11. T. J. Nathaniel, N. Johnson, and M. Jakobsson. Social phishing. Communications of the ACM. Retrieved March, 7, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  12. J. Park and R. Sandhu. Towards Usage Control Models: Beyond Traditional Access Control. In SACMAT ’02: Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies, pages 57–64. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  13. F. Schneider, A. Feldmann, B. Krishnamurthy, and W. Willinger. Understanding Online Social Network Usage from a Network Perspective. In ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  14. L. von Ahn, M. Blum, N. J. Hopper, and J. Langford. CAPTCHA: Using Hard AI Problems for Security. In EUROCRYPT 2003. LNCS, vol 2656, pages 294–311. Springer, Heidelberg, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  15. S. D. Warren and L. D. Brandeis. The right to privacy. Harward Law Review, 4(5):193–220, December 1890.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. G. Wondracek, T. Holz, E. Kirda, and C. Kruegel. A Practical Attack to De-Anonymize Social Network Users. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. IEEE CS, 2010. http://www.iseclab.org/papers/sonda.pdf.

  17. W. Zhao, R. Chellappa, P. J. Phillips, and A. Rosenfeld. Face recognition: a literature survey. ACM Computing Surveys, 35(4):399–458, 2003.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. E. Zheleva and L. Getoor. To Join or Not to Join: The Illusion of Privacy in Social Networks with Mixed Public and Private User Profiles. In WWW 2009, pages 531–540. ACM, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Thorsten Strufe .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Cutillo, L.A., Manulis, M., Strufe, T. (2010). Security and Privacy in Online Social Networks. In: Furht, B. (eds) Handbook of Social Network Technologies and Applications. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7142-5_23

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7142-5_23

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-7141-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-7142-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics