Analysis on the security mechanisms of user data protection in Facebook

As online social networks are booming in recent years, their security issues have attracted more and more concerns. The valuable user data stored in online social networks have been a battleground to both criminals or attackers and social network service providers. Considering such a severe competition, whether the user data are as safe as online social networks have declared is worth our research. Using facebook as the study case, we describe in detail the security threats to its user data, as well as its protection mechanism named facebook immune system. With elaborated experiments, we analyze in depth and then verify to some extent the effects of facebook immune system on preventing the friend request from being used maliciously in facebook.