Difficulties in Detection and Mitigation of Various Attacks Against OSNs

Due to the various technical complications, the detection and mitigation of various threats in social network platforms have become difficult. Some of the complications are described below:

• • Privacy problems and alarms: Various service providers provide different privacy and security settings to different users for their account protection. We have detected various privacy mechanisms provided by OSNs for securing the accounts. There could be a wide range of discrimination that endures in OSN privacy. It has been noted that many of the OSN users are not aware of the privacy settings (Fang & LeFevre, 2010). Some of the features related to privacy settings on OSNs are depicted in Table 1.3.
• • Guessing the behaviour of OSN users: The behaviour of different OSN users varies based on their usage and the features provided by the service provider. Li (2012) describes the regard in which users

TABLE 1.3 Various privacy settings on online social networks

hold different OSNs with respect to privacy concerns. As a sample, 250 understudies were chosen randomly from different social network sites and 185 polls are filled effectively. Out of all the content, three-fourths of respondents are male account holders and one- fourth are female. Subsequently, more than 75% of male users are below the age of 40 years. All most all users are using Facebook, and around 45% users are using Twitter for message sharing and information broadcast. Based on the user’s behaviour, the personality of the user is predicted. Also, the use of text and style describes the user’s behaviour.

• • Different threats in OSNs: Nowadays, various security issues exist in social network platform based on privacy. It is a challenging task for security analysts and the researchers to protect the user contents and their accounts from various threats. These threats are broadly classified into various groups such as active attacks, passive attacks, and privacy breaches. All these attacks exploit various functionalities provided by social network platform.
• • Security setting on the user’s side: To protect user account and their information in social network platform, security setting is one of the major concerns by the user. Different OSNs like Facebook and Twitter limit protections as a default setting. It is highly crucial for all users to go through their profile security options and set their protection choices as per their uses. By improving the security setting, users on Facebook can limit their account access. However, all these features are not sufficient to protect user’s information and accounts from various threats.
• • Lack of security solutions at developers end: Deployment of total security solution is not possible by the developer team of social networks due to public access. In addition, such developers focus mainly on the development of products and their compatibility with the users.
• • Maintaining QoS during attack: During various attacks on OSNs, the resources are exhausted and legitimate user’s quality of service (QoS) degrades based on the uses (Liu et al., 2017). Hence, it is a big challenge to maintain the desired QoS for every user over the OSN.
• • High false-positive rate with low detection: Reducing the impact of attack, detection, and mitigation of various threats in OSNs requires timely detection (Freeman, 2017). Faster detection mechanism may lead to an increase in the misclassification rate and vice versa. Hence, it is required to detect the threats quickly with high detection and less false-positive rate.

Summary

For communication and information sharing, OSN is a prominent gateway for people nowadays. The users of the OSNs enjoy a lot while using social network platforms. This leads to attracting various attackers to engage in some malicious activities. Therefore, the main focus of this chapter is to describe the rapid growth of OSNs in different domains. It also illuminates various statistics unveiled by different security organisations. This chapter also provides a comprehensive detail regarding the various usages of OSNs based on different requirements and some of the harmful vulnerabilities. It concludes that there are some security issues in various OSN domains which hamper user credentials and reputation. Furthermore, this chapter describes some difficulties related to the detection and mitigation of various attacks against OSNs.

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Security Challenges in Social Networking