Online social networks (OSNs) are nowadays an indispensable tool for communication on account of their rise, simplicity, and efficacy. Worldwide users use OSN as a tool for social interactions, news propagation, gaming, political propaganda, and advertisement in building brand awareness, etc. At the same time, many OSN users unintentionally expose their personal information that is used by the malicious users and third-party apps to perform various kind for cyber-crimes like social engineering attacks, cyber espionage, extortion-malware, drug-trafficking, misinformation, cyberbullying, hijacking clicks, identity theft, phishing, mistrusts, fake profiles, and spreading malicious content. This chapter presents an overview of various cyber-crimes associated with OSN environment to gain insight into ongoing cyber-attacks. Also, counter mechanisms in the form of tools, techniques, and frameworks are suggested.
TopIntroduction
The outburst of the World Wide Web is the most productive and expedient ways to find and distribute information. The Web 2.0 has emerged from “read-only web” to “read-write web” constitutes tools such as podcasting, blogging, tagging, RSS feed, social bookmarking, social networking platforms, web content voting etc. With the start of Web 2.0, the media becomes very dynamic and used as blogs, messenger services, websites, social networking sites etc. to provide vast applications such as communication, news, entertainment, businesses, gaming, marketing and advertisement, live-streaming, job search, dating, education, healthcare etc. Among many social media tools, the popularity and usage of OSNs have increased at an incredible rate and becomes an essential tool for every OSN user worldwide. The main focus of this chapter is towards OSNs and its associated cyber-crimes. (Anderson, 2016). In figure 1, the relationship between web 2.0, social media and online social networks is mentioned.
In OSNs, the developers and designers have given much focus on the design and features. However, less emphasis is provided on the privacy and security of OSN users. So this has become a wide area of research and has fascinated the interest of many research scholars. In this chapter, authors aim is to provide valuable understandings regarding the social media ecosystem, various cyber-crimes and vulnerabilities associated with OSNs, and security mechanisms to prevent such attacks.
Figure 1. Relationship between web 2.0, social media and OSNs
TopOnline social media ecosystem is used as a vehicle for communication and is based on 3C's, i.e. creation, curation, and consumption. The content on the social media ecosystem can be self-created/owned in the form for posts, page, and blogs etc., paid media in the form advertisement and earned media in the form of spam and viral messages etc. In figure 2, the Social media ecosystem (Sharma et al., 2020) is mentioned. Social media ecosystem consists of numerous entities represented as different forms of media, social media content used (text, audio, video, real-time and on-demand etc.), various types of users, usage, computing platform, personalization and management and so forth.
Figure 2. (Sharma et al., 2020) TopOnline Social Network - Model And Services
OSN is a web-based tool that offers many as web-based services to the OSN user such as profile creation, adding friends/follower, content creation and sharing etc.
OSN platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn etc. use social network services (SNS) to perform a set of operations (Cutillo et al., 2010). The three-layered architecture of Social Network Model is shown in figure 3.
Figure 3. The three-layered architecture of OSN model
Social network services can be described by a three-layered model with specific tasks as follows:
- 1.
Social Network (SN) Layer: Constructs the digital representations of members and their connections. This layer offers two classes of functions to each member depending on their social communications. Real-time communications management functions such as chats, posts, phone calls, emails and tweets etc. are managed by first class. In contrast, relationship management functions such as profile access rights, reputation administration and friend requests etc. are controlled by second class.
- 2.
Application Service (AS) Layer: Establishes the application infrastructure supervised by OSN platforms. This layer implements SN layer functions such as data storage, network and communication services. The essential functions managed by this layer are data retrieval, indexing, data access control and shift control to other servers in case of failures etc.
- 3.
Communication and Transport (CT) Layer: Characterizes the communication and transport internet services governed by one or more network service providers.