A social approach to security: Using social networks to help detect malicious web content

In the midst of a social networking revolution, social media has become the new vehicle for effective business marketing and transactions. As social aspects to the Internet continue to expand in both quantity and scope, so has the security threat towards enterprise networks and systems. Many social networking users also become main targets of spams, phishing, stalking, and other malware attacks that exploit the trust among social network “friends”. This paper presents a comprehensive method combining traditional security heuristics with social networking data to aid in the detection of malicious web content as it propagates through the user's network. A Facebook application is implemented to automatically evaluate and detect malicious link content. The results of testing this application against known phishing and malware sites with real-world user profiles have shown encouraging results.