A Secure and Sustainable Framework to Mitigate Hazardous Activities in Online Social Networks

Abstract

Recent years have seen continuous exposure of online social network (OSN) users to the security vulnerability due to socio-technical cyber hazards committed by OSN associates. Unfortunately, the current OSN platforms has lack of functionalities for automatic users protection in initiating online friendship and online users interaction within their circle. Moreover, the users cannot analyze their associates' time-varying and changing behavior, which is a strong indicator of malicious activities. To address this issue, this paper proposes a design of automatic two-phase pre- and post-filtering approach with the objective of mitigating the cyber threats in OSN platforms. In the pre-filtering phase, we propose a method where each user can access a reliable technique to select a friend after getting his/her details authenticity. In the post-filtering phase, a control mechanism is established to recognize malicious posts/actions of the associates in order to limit the spread of the corresponding cyber threats. Our empirical analysis shows some significant comparison data towards hybrid (combined pre- and post-filtering) method, where the users' consents for our proposed method exceed significantly over the other competing techniques. In fact, the proportional mean value of the hybrid method is increased almost twice (2.03) of the existing methods.