Issues and Challenges of Cyber Security for Social Networking Sites (Facebook)

Abstract

Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Google+, and LinkedIn are the popular social sites. Facebook is most popular social networking site. Social sites are most common platform to communicate with their other friends, family and share thoughts, photos, videos and lots of information. Social networking websites have become platforms for cybercriminals for cybercrime; cybercriminals exploit sensitive and personal information through social engineering and reverse social engineering. It is usual for the users of social websites to share information; however they lose privacy, while sharing information with strangers, they can fall in honey trap made by them. Privacy has become an important concern in online social networking sites. Users are unaware of the privacy risks involved when they share their sensitive information on the social network sites. The default settings share everything, users have to change their default privacy setting options to make their accounts and personal information more secure. Security attacks continue to be a major concern of all users. How to keep social networking sites more secure and more private are the challenges that have been concern for every user. It is difficult for social networking sites and users to make and adjust privacy setting to protect privacy without practical and effective way to identify measure and evaluate privacy. Maximum numbers of users are not aware of the security risk associated whenever they shared sensitive data on the social sites, so that privacy concern will be raised among those online communications if their personal data has been shared to other users. The users should be aware of their privacy quotient and should know where they stand in the privacy measuring scale. Unfortunately many users are not aware of this and become victim of privacy and identity breach. So we conducted a survey to find users view regarding security and privacy of social networking sites and regarding default privacy setting improvement particularly Facebook.