Social Media Security: Identity Theft Prevention

Abstract

Social networking sites are becoming parts and parcels of our daily life. With the increasing of its popularity, the cybercrimes, targeting these platforms are also increasing. Cybercriminals use this platform to harass the victims personally, socially and financially. Such type of crimes is performed using some of the vulnerabilities of the social networking platforms. Identity theft is one of those crimes which is increasing alarmingly. By creating a fake account, using the same information and profile picture, one can easily take disguise of another person. Hence, the criminal can chat with other persons impersonating the victim. Thus, the criminal takes the disguise of a person and starts harassing other people. The consequence of this problem is very dangerous. By doing so, the criminal ruins the image of the victim. There are so many cases where victims attempted to commit suicide after facing this type of terrible problem. All these things are occurring as the criminal can download or collect the profile picture of the victim easily and open a clone account easily. The availability of information is giving the chance to the cybercriminal to make an account exactly looks like the victim’s one. In this paper, we attempt to prevent this type of identity theft by an image based solution on the social networking platforms. The name of this model is ‘Image Based Identity Theft Prevention’.