Social Media and its extremely adverse effects- ( PART-2 )

Social Media and its extremely adverse effects-  ( PART-2 )

With the increasing usage of online social network,many users have unknowingly become exposed to various threat,both on privacy and security.It has been recently revealed that terrorist organizations operating in various parts of the world particularly in developing and poor countries like Afghanistan,Iraq,Syria Pakistan,India,Nepal etc are planning to conduct more heinous crime against children,families,and personnel of different organization.They may use social media for fake,profiling of employees of their targeted people.Therefor it is necessary to under stand how social media net work can be used for such crimes in general and to threaten the lives of innocent people and their families in particular.These threats have been elaborated below with real examples. 

(1) Malware is malicious software which is developed to disrupt a computer operation  in order to collect  a user's credentials and gain access to his or her private information.Malware in social net working environment uses on line social net work structure to spread itself  between users and their friends in the net work.For example Koobface was the first malware to successfully propagate through on line social network.This malware succeeded in attacking users in many different on line  social networks ,such as Facebook,and tweeter.Upon infection ,koobface attempts to collect log in information and join the infected computer in order to be part of botnet ,a so called ,zombie army ,of computer,which in many cases is then used  for criminal activities ,such as sending spam message and attacking other computers and servers on the internet. 

(2) A case was reported in September 2009 at Washington DC ,where a resident prepared a fake profile of a female college student,posted obscene status and comments about her and also provided her telephone number.Following this ,the victim started receiving vulgar messages and calls.It is also happening all over the world now a days.where children specially girls are under threat for such activity without being noticed by the parents.Fake profiles are automatic or semi automatic profiles that imitate human behaviors in on line social net work.In many cases ,fake profile can be used to harvest personal user data from on line social network.By initiating friend request  to other users in the on line social network ,who in many cases accepts the request ,the social boats can gather a user's private data which should be exposed only to the user's friend.Facebook recently estimated that around 8.7% of its users ,more than 83 million profiles are fake or duplicate account.These duplicate accounts can be part of a social bots army used by individuals or companies with malicious intent to collect data related to social net work users.

(3) This attack was first reported with NATO's most senior commander .His profile detail were cloned (duplicate created ) used to collect data on defense ministry officials  and other government officials by tricking them  to become friends with the newly cloned Facebook profile.Using this technique ,attacker duplicate a user's on line presence in the same net work.or across different network,in order to deceive user's friend into forming a trusting relationship with the cloned profile.The attacker can use this trust to collect personal information about the user's friend or to perform various type of on line frauds.  

( Continue, for more detail see next part-3 )