Sharing Social Network Data: Differentially Private Estimation of Exponential-Family Random Graph Models

Motivated by a real-life problem of sharing social network data that contain sensitive personal information, we propose a novel approach to release and analyze synthetic graphs in order to protect privacy of individual relationships captured by the social network while maintaining the validity of statistical results. A case study using a version of the Enron e-mail corpus dataset demonstrates the application and usefulness of the proposed techniques in solving the challenging problem of maintaining privacy \emph{and} supporting open access to network data to ensure reproducibility of existing studies and discovering new scientific insights that can be obtained by analyzing such data. We use a simple yet effective randomized response mechanism to generate synthetic networks under $\epsilon$-edge differential privacy, and then use likelihood based inference for missing data and Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques to fit exponential-family random graph models to the generated synthetic networks.Comment: Updated, 39 page

Fake Profile Identification on Online Social Networks

Online social networks are web-based applications that allow user to communicate and share knowledge and information. The number of users who make use of these platforms are experiencing rapid growth both in profile creation and social interaction. However, intruders and malicious attackers have found their way into the networks, using fake profiles, thus exposing user to serious security and privacy problem.  Every user in the online social network should verify and authenticate their identities, with the other users as they interact. However, currently verification of user’s profiles and identities is faced with challenges, to the extent that a user may represent their identity with many profiles without any effective method of identity verification. As a result of this vulnerability, attackers create fake profiles which they use in attacking the online social system. In addition, online social networks use a logically centered architecture, where their control and management are under a service; provider, who must be entrusted with the security of data and communication traces; this further increases the vulnerability to attacks and online threats. In this paper, we demonstrate the causes and effects of fake profiles on online social networks, and then provide a review of the state-of-the-art mechanism for identifying and mitigating fake profiles on online social networks. Keywords: online social networks, fake profiles, sybil attack, fake account

Analyzing Activity and Suspension Patterns of Twitter Bots Attacking Turkish Twitter Trends by a Longitudinal Dataset

Twitter bots amplify target content in a coordinated manner to make them appear popular, which is an astroturfing attack. Such attacks promote certain keywords to push them to Twitter trends to make them visible to a broader audience. Past work on such fake trends revealed a new astroturfing attack named ephemeral astroturfing that employs a very unique bot behavior in which bots post and delete generated tweets in a coordinated manner. As such, it is easy to mass-annotate such bots reliably, making them a convenient source of ground truth for bot research. In this paper, we detect and disclose over 212,000 such bots targeting Turkish trends, which we name astrobots. We also analyze their activity and suspension patterns. We found that Twitter purged those bots en-masse 6 times since June 2018. However, the adversaries reacted quickly and deployed new bots that were created years ago. We also found that many such bots do not post tweets apart from promoting fake trends, which makes it challenging for bot detection methods to detect them. Our work provides insights into platforms' content moderation practices and bot detection research. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/tugrulz/EphemeralAstroturfing.Comment: Accepted to Cyber Social Threats (CySoc) 2023 colocated with WebConf2

SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES AND INDIAN TEENAGERS

The social networking sites have a primary purpose of promoting communication and interactions amongst users. Such sites like Facebook, Orkut, and Twitter have become popular and a vital part of social life in India, especially among teenagers. However, available literature indicates lack of in-depth study to evaluate how and why Indian teenagers engage with social networking sites. This study hopes to fill this gap as it uses Focus Group Discussion to explore the experiences of Indian teenagers with social networking sites. Information from the groups was analyzed in terms of their use of social networking sites, online versus offline friendships, and extending friendships beyond cyberspace. Our findings indicate that both boys and girls use other forms of communication channels to strengthen existing friendships more with the same gender than with the opposite. However, the boys enjoy more freedom when compared with the girls and they admitted talking to online friends and meeting them outside cyberspace without any hesitation. The girls, on their part, were hesitant to extend online friendships beyond virtual space because of security issues and resistance from family members.Keywords: Social Networking Sites (SNSs), Teenagers, Online relationship, Offline relationship, Indi

SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES AND INDIAN TEENAGERS

The social networking sites have a primary purpose of promoting communication and interactions amongst users. Such sites like Facebook, Orkut, and Twitter have become popular and a vital part of social life in India, especially among teenagers. However, available literature indicates lack of in-depth study to evaluate how and why Indian teenagers engage with social networking sites. This study hopes to fill this gap as it uses Focus Group Discussion to explore the experiences of Indian teenagers with social networking sites. Information from the groups was analyzed in terms of their use of social networking sites, online versus offline friendships, and extending friendships beyond cyberspace. Our findings indicate that both boys and girls use other forms of communication channels to strengthen existing friendships more with the same gender than with the opposite. However, the boys enjoy more freedom when compared with the girls and they admitted talking to online friends and meeting them outside cyberspace without any hesitation. The girls, on their part, were hesitant to extend online friendships beyond virtual space because of security issues and resistance from family members.Keywords: Social Networking Sites (SNSs), Teenagers, Online relationship, Offline relationship, Indi

SOCIAL ENGINEERING IN SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES: HOW GOOD BECOMES EVIL

Social Engineering (ES) is now considered the great security threat to people and organizations. Ever since the existence of human beings, fraudulent and deceptive people have used social engineering tricks and tactics to trick victims into obeying them. There are a number of social engineering techniques that are used in information technology to compromise security defences and attack people or organizations such as phishing, identity theft, spamming, impersonation, and spaying. Recently, researchers have suggested that social networking sites (SNSs) are the most common source and best breeding grounds for exploiting the vulnerabilities of people and launching a variety of social engineering based attacks. However, the literature shows a lack of information about what types of social engineering threats exist on SNSs. This study is part of a project that attempts to predict a persons’ vulnerability to SE based on demographic factors. In this paper, we demonstrate the different types of social engineering based attacks that exist on SNSs, the purposes of these attacks, reasons why people fell (or did not fall) for these attacks, based on users’ opinions. A qualitative questionnaire-based survey was conducted to collect and analyse people’s experiences with social engineering tricks, deceptions, or attacks on SNSs

Facebook as a research tool for the social sciences: opportunities, challenges, ethical considerations, and practical guidelines

Facebook is rapidly gaining recognition as a powerful research tool for the social sciences. It constitutes a large and diverse pool of participants, who can be selectively recruited for both online and offline studies. Additionally, it facilitates data collection by storing detailed records of its users’ demographic profiles, social interactions, and behaviors. With participants’ consent, these data can be recorded retrospectively in a convenient, accurate, and inexpensive way. Based on our experience in designing, implementing, and maintaining multiple Facebook-based psychological studies that attracted over 10 million participants, we demonstrate how to recruit participants using Facebook, incentivize them effectively, and maximize their engagement. We also outline the most important opportunities and challenges associated with using Facebook for research, provide several practical guidelines on how to successfully implement studies on Facebook, and finally, discuss ethical considerations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved

A Longitudinal Study of Factors that Affect User Interactions with Social Media and Email Spam

Given the rapid growth of social media and the increasing prevalence of spam, it is crucial to understand users’ interactions with unsolicited content to develop effective countermeasures against spam. This thesis focuses on exploring the factors that influence users’ decisions to interact with spam on social media and email. It builds upon prior work, which serves as a foundation for further research and conducting a longitudinal analysis. Our results are based on the analysis of 221 responses collected through an online survey. The survey not only gathered demographic information such as age, gender, and race but also collected data on education, spam training, interaction with spam, and experiences of being a victim of spam. With about 87% of respondents stating they sometimes, often, or always encounter spam on social media, only 23% interact with it sometimes, often, or always before knowing it was spam, and 10% sometimes, often, or always interact with social media spam after knowing it was spam. Of the 75% of the respondents who stated that they sometimes, often, or always encounter email spam, approximately 13% of the respondents stated that they sometimes, often, or always interact with email spam before knowing it is spam, and 6%s stated that they sometimes, often, or always interact with email spam after knowing it is spam. Although only 38% of the users stated that they may have been victims of social media spam and 21% stated that they may have been victims of email spam. Among the factors analyzed, only age had an effect on reporting email spam, but not social media spam. A STEM education was found to reduce the likelihood of being a victim of both social media and email spam, as well as reduce the likelihood of interacting with both email and social media spam, but only before users knew they were interacting with spam. Interestingly, formal spam training did not show any statistical significance in determining how users interact with, report, or become victims of social media spam, although there was an effect when observing the identification of email spam. To quantify the effect of different factors on individuals falling victim to spam on social media and email, a logistic regression analysis was performed. The research findings suggest that individuals with a higher attained degree and a STEM background are the least likely to be victims of spam