Pierluigi Paganini November 02, 2011

Online Social Networks(OSN) are an integral part of today’s Web.  Hacktivist,Politicians, celebrities, revolutionists, and others use OSNs as carrier for their message to a wide audience.

The downside is that these powerful tools can be used to spread disinformation and propaganda. The next generation of social engineering attacks is even more deceptive; they employ an automation software called a socialbot that controls a profil in an OSN, and has the ability to execute basic online social activities.

In the attached paper, is demostrated how vulnerable OSNs are to a large-scale infltration by socialbots: computer programs that control OSN accounts and mimic real users. Adopting a traditional web-based

botnet design and built a Socialbot Network (SbN): a group of adaptive socialbots that are orchestrated in a command-and-control fashion. In the abstract are proposed tge results obtained using the following OSN Vulnerabilities:

1. Ineffective CAPTCHAs
2. Fake User Accounts and Profiles
3. Crawlable Social Graphs
4. Exploitable Platforms and API

The results show that OSNs, such as Facebook, can be infiltrated with a success rate of up to 80% depending on users’ privacy settings, a successful infiltration can result in privacy breaches where even more users’ data are exposed when compared to a purely public access, and in practice, OSN security defenses, such as the Facebook Immune System, are not effective enough in detecting or stopping a large scale infiltration as it occurs. I believe that large-scale infiltration in OSNs is only one of many future cyber threats, and defending against such threats is the first step towards maintaining a safer social Web for millions of active web users.

References:

The Socialbot Network: When Bots Socialize for Fame and Money