Reverse Social Engineering Attacks in Online Social Networks Essay

Reverse Social Engineering Attacks in Online Social Networks - Essay Example However, this significant step is a very ethically sensitive domain, questions addressing the justification of carrying out such a study on real users without their knowledge do arise. However, it is inevitable to examine this issue through this method due to the fact that there is no other alternative methodology available. It was made certain the all the sensitive information was cautiously handled and during aggregate analysis, the data was anonymised and no manual inspection was carried out. Since the experiment was conducted in Europe, the legal department of the institution was consulted which is analogous to Institute Review Board (IRB) in the US and they approved of the data handling procedure. In the study, a single account was initiated which performed a large number of email search queries, the profile was then recommended by the site suggestion system to multiple profiles as a potential friend and as a result, thousand friend requests were received by the account. This wa s to show how easy it is to trick users into establishing a trust relationship in the networking sites. In the second set of experiments, five different attack profiles were generated for three social networks. The attackers rely on a form of baiting system in which the victim is lured to contact the attacker itself. Two types of attack exist Mediated, in which baiting is performed by an intermediate body such as that of Facebook friend suggestion system and secondly, the direct system in which baiting is visible to the targeted user.