syssec_red_book

5 Social NetworksFraming the familiar notion of “social networks” in the Digial Era,most people tend to think about online social networks such as Facebook,Google+, and Twitter. As the popularity and use of such online socialnetworks has increased, the attackers have also started considering how to usethem for nefarious activities. They have become new platforms for conductingmalicious activities and desirable targets for launching attacks.However, such online social networks are just a subset of all the socialnetworks that actually exist. Any set of people and their internal social relationships,representing their interaction, collaboration, or other sort of influencebetween them, can be modeled as a general social network. These relationshipsare formed by exchanging emails, making phone calls, co-authoring a scientificarticle, or a range of other “normal” activities that will build up a network.Such information is now collected and organized to gain insights into people’slives, but this is also a venue that attackers will use. They can either attackthe properties of the network by, for example, introducing false nodes, or gainenough information to attack the individual users.The explosive growth rate of social networks has created the first digitalgeneration, consisting of people of all ages and backgrounds. People arecreating their digital counterparts for interacting with other users, for bothrecreational and professional reasons, and may disclose a vast amount ofpersonal data in an attempt to utilize these new services to the fullest. Asthe social network is a representation of social interaction, it also indirectlyshows the trust between different individuals. However, the lack of technicalliteracy among the majority of users has resulted in a naive approach wherethe caution demonstrated in the social interactions of the physical world hasdisappeared. Users are vulnerable to a series of dangers, ranging from identitytheft to monetary loss, and lack the critical approach that develops over timeand is passed on through generations. As users tend to show a great amountof trust to online communication and interactions, adversaries aim to sneakinto a victim’s circle of trust through impersonation. As people trust theirfriends, the cyber criminal can then perform a range of attacks that may not bepossible, or effective, as a “stranger.”