Mohammad Al Hamami presented "SOCIAL NETWORK SECURITY" at #SMMF2012 #Bahrain

1. THE SECURITY AWARNESS OF
SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES USAGE
DR. MOHAMMAD ALAA AL-HAMAMI
DELMON UNIVERSITY FOR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

2. INTRODUCTION

3. INTRODUCTION
• Social networking sites enhance our
life, we can’t count the advantages that
we could get if we use them in a good
manner.
• But at the same time these sites could
be a main security threat if we don’t
have the awareness to use them in a
safety way.

4. THE DANGER OF SOCIAL
NETWORKS

5. THE DANGER OF SOCIAL
NETWORKS
• Social networking sites can be:
– A source of personal & business information leaks.
– A malware attack vector when not used carefully.
• Users trust their contacts to:
– Not send bad links.
– Not trying to infect their computers.
– And take good care of their personal data.
• URL shorteners are a security concern and
should be taken very seriously in social
networks.

6. SOCIAL NETWORKS PROBLEMS
FROM A LEGAL POINT OF VIEW

7. SOCIAL NETWORKS PROBLEMS
FROM A LEGAL POINT OF VIEW
• Violation user’s data protection rights.
• Identity Fraud.
• Absence of uniform rule at the international
level.

8. WHAT COULD GO WRONG IN
SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES?

9. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
• Your contact’s account is compromised
and somebody else is using it.
• You added somebody to your network that
you thought you knew but, in fact, you did
not.
• You added somebody you thought was
trustworthy but he/she turns out not to be.
• Insufficient use of privacy controls caused
you to share data with people you never
intended.

10. WHAT DATA THAT COULD BE
MINED IN SOCIAL NETWORKS?

11. Social networks contain a wealth of
information like:

12. DATA THAT COULD BE MINED IN
SOCIAL NETWORKS
• USER IDENTIFIERS AND ATTRIBUTES.
• CONTACT INFORMATION .
• WORK.
• EDUCATION.
• PERSONAL INFORMATION AND
INTERESTS .
• CONNECTION AND USAGE
INFORMATION .

13. These information
are treasure for
Attackers and
Criminals !

14. SO WHAT ATTACKERS WILL
DO WITH THE MINED DATA?

15. SO WHAT ATTACKERS WILL DO
WITH THE MINED DATA?
• Underground forums sell information:
– Your data can be mined and stored
somewhere in the dark corners of the Internet
waiting for a criminal to pay the right price for
it.
– Criminals can use this information to obtain
birth certificates/passports and other
documents.

16. MOST IMPORTANT DATA
FOR ATTACKERS

17. MOST IMPORTANT DATA FOR
ATTACKERS
• Email addresses:
– Used for spam campaigns.
– Can be categorized to improve the impact of the
campaign like age, country and other factors so
that its market price is higher than just any
normal email address.
– Can also be a great value for phishing
campaigns.

18. MOST IMPORTANT DATA FOR
ATTACKERS
• Real-life addresses:
– Often shared in social networking sites.
– They can be used to collect mailing databases
for advertising purposes in a similar way as
described above.

19. MOST IMPORTANT DATA FOR
ATTACKERS
• Date of birth:
– Used by different companies to confirm
people’s identities over the telephone.
– Criminals have tools to automate “date of birth”
searches in social networking sites.

20. MOST IMPORTANT DATA FOR
ATTACKERS
• Public Profile:
– A potential massive data-leak-age.
– Social networking search engines can search
all available data about any name in a certain
region.
– Public profile makes the lives of stalkers,
fraudsters, or any other attackers much easier.

21. PRIVACY IN A CONNECTED
WORLD: A STORY

22. PRIVACY IN A CONNECTED WORLD:
A STORY
• In July 2009, the wife of a high-level government
executive in the UK published personal data in a social
networking site.
• This had get a lot of attention:
– Not for the confidentiality of the content,
– But for the lack of awareness about the accessibility of your
online content.
– There is also another issue to play here, the fact that once you
publish anything online, you will lose the control over it,
people leech and republish it on places you do not even
know !

23. HOW CAN ATTACKERS FOOL
SOCIAL NETWORKS USERS?

24. HOW CAN ATTACKERS FOOL SOCIAL
NETWORKS USERS?
• Creating a fake celebrity profile.
• Creating a duplicate of somebody’s
profile.
• Creating a profile, adding themselves
to a medium-sized group or
community. Then joining a second
group and starting again.
• Creating a female profile and
publishing a pretty picture of “herself”.

25. WHY ATTACKERS SUCCESS IN FOOLING
SOCIAL NETWORKS USERS?

26. WHY ATTACKERS SUCCESS IN FOOLING
SOCIAL NETWORKS USERS?
- A lot of users don’t realize that:
- Their contact lists is a circle of trust.
- And by adding somebody they don’t know
they are opening their data to untrusted
parties.
- Some sites don’t have privacy controls in
place, or the ones they have do not protect
all user data.

27. WHY ATTACKERS SUCCESS IN FOOLING
SOCIAL NETWORKS USERS?
- The user is often not concern to select who
can access his/her data.
- The user don’t use the available controls
because they appear too complex or time-
consuming (laziness or lack of knowledge).

28. WHAT CAN AN ATTACKER DO WITH
LARGE NETWORK OF USERS?

29. WHAT CAN AN ATTACKER DO ?
• Advertise.
• Collect Contact Information.
• Phishing.
• Malware Installation.

30. WHEN SOCIAL NETWORKING
SITES CODE BREAKS !

31. WHEN CODE BREAKS
• Attack vector is the exploitation of programming
flaws in websites.
• These Web pages have been made by humans
and they can have errors that could compromise
the site’s security measures.
• Poor security, weak administration practices, or
badly written code can all help attackers to
gather your data or help them stage a bigger
attack against any number of users.

32. WHEN CODE BREAKS
• Social networking sites keep adding to their
security controls and refining their existing ones.
• But as in any development project, they also
continue to innovate on their platforms and add
exciting new features.
• These new options need to keep up with the
security features or they too will suffer from
security weaknesses.

33. CODE BREAKS EXAMPLES

34. Pinterest
• In Pinterest, a cross-site scripting
vulnerability and an iframe injection issue
had been identified that could allow
hackers to hijack user accounts and
perform other malicious operations.
• It had been found a URL redirection flaw
that could redirect the site’s visitors to
other potentially malicious domains.

35. CODE BREAKS EXAMPLES

36. Facebook
• There have been instances of security flaws
on Facebook that allowed anybody to access
the “basic information” data of any user, no
matter what their security settings were.
• This attack was released by casual users after
Facebook ignored the users’ warnings for a
few days. No great knowledge was needed in
this case to exploit a security weakness.

37. CODE BREAKS EXAMPLES

38. Twitter
• Twitter had “cross-site scripting” attacks
performed against it. In these attacks, the
attackers could change the Twitter status
of any user accessing the attacker’s
account.
• This meant that the bad guys could make
you tweet bad links so your Twitter
followers would be at risk of being
infected.

39. CODE BREAKS EXAMPLES

40. MySpace
• MySpace was attacked in 2007 by a JavaScript
that would copy itself to the viewer’s profile
along with a piece of text—“Samy is my hero.”
This was caused by a security flaw that could
have caused the victim to run any other
command like redirecting the page to a
malicious website.
• Thankfully, the young man who discovered the
flaw and created the worm only wanted to have
more friends added to his profile.

41. WHEN CODE BREAKS:
EXAMPLES
• These Four examples are not the only cases of
security flaws on social networking sites.
• In fact, such flaws are identified frequently.
• News about such security holes are released
every month and are a concern for all affected
web-sites and their users.
• Since their solution is out of the user’s hands, it
is difficult or impossible to do anything about
them.

42. SUMMARY
• There are some simple steps and points
that we should consider to protect our
privacy in social networks such as:
– Keep your information as general as possible.
– Read the privacy policy of social networking
sites.
– Do not add people that you don’t Know or
trust.

43. SUMMARY
– If you are using social networks to meet new
people you should create a special account
for that.
– Do not click any unknown or suspicious
hyperlinks.
– Remember that any data you publish in the
Internet it will be there forever and anyone
could use and share it.

45. REFERENCES
[1] http://www.hausarbeiten.de/faecher/vorschau/147360.html
[2] http://us.trendmicro.com/us/trendwatch/current-threat
activity/undergroundeconomy/index.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/papers/NETWORKS_LEGAL_PROBLEMS.PDF
[4] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1197562/MI6-chief-blows-cover-wifes-Facebook-
account-revealsfamily-holidays-showbiz-friends-links-David-Irving.html
[5] http://www.onrec.com/newsstories/17612.asp
[6] http://www.scmagazineus.com/Facebook-bloggers-reveal-way-to-peek-at-private-
profiles/article/138867/
[7] http://blogs.computerworld.com/twitter_stalkdaily_mikeyy_xss_worm
[8] http://www.betanews.com/article/CrossSite-Scripting-Worm-Hits-MySpace/1129232391