Survey of Online Social Networks Threats and Solutions

In the last few years, a new form of Internet-based services has started, which is called Online Social Networks (OSNs). The impact of OSNs on human lives is foreseen to be very large with unprecedented amount of data and users. OSN users share their ideas, photos, daily life events, feelings and news. Since OSNs' security and privacy challenges are more potential than ever before, it is necessary to enhance the protection and filtering approaches of OSNs contents. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of OSNs' threats and challenges, and categorize them into: account-based, URL-based and content-based threats. We analyze the existing protection methods and highlight their limitations and weaknesses. Finally, we provide a set of recommendations for a security system that fill the gaps of the currently applied methods.