Today's social network sites: An analysis of emerging security risks and their counter measures

The concept of social networking sites boomed in this modern era of globalization as it opens the door for the people to communicate with each other despite thinking about geographical distances. Perceived benefits from these social networks are not limited to only connecting people but provide more than that such as sharing media contents, opinions about a topic, promoting business through digital marketing and staying up to date with recent stories around the world. A number of social network sites are available today, some of which are considered as giants in this domain such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Friendster, and Tribe. The wide adoption of these social networking sites urged researchers to think about security concerns, as when the communication is over the internet; there is always a higher probability that confidentiality of personal information can be compromised. With the pursuit of security goals, existing studies share the knowledge about different types of attacks and techniques used by malicious entities to strike against these social sites. To defend these attacks, different security measures have been adopted by organizations providing social networking services. Substantial discussions about the adoption of social sites, possible attacks and their countermeasures in contemporary studies became the motivation for this research. In this paper, we have introduced a taxonomy of social websites attacks and provided our literature survey results that help to categorize possible attacks and preferred counteractions to defense against these attacks. For now, this categorization is based on the type of communication used and attacker'a s goals. Further, we are interested in investigating the security of social sites with respect to users.