Forensics and Social Networking Sites

In this article we will look at forensics and social networking sites. We will look at different concerns related to social networking cites and challenges.

Social networking site is defined as web-based services that allow individuals to:

• Create a public or semi-public profile
• Search or navigate through a list of users with whom they share a common connection
• View connections of other users

Watch this video to learn about social networking sites and forensics:

Although social networking sites have their uses, there are several associated security threats. The concerns regarding social networking sites are:

• Does the social networking site violate people’s intellectual property rights
• Whether these sites infringe the privacy of their own users
• Whether these sites promote fraudulent and illegal activities

Content preservation can be challenging given the dynamic, short-lived and often multi-format nature of social media. There is generally no control over the content posted on social media networking sites. High level of forensic skill is required to analyze and quantify the preserved data to answer questions such as:

• Who posted the offending content?
• Is there a real live person to whom the offending content can be attributed even when evidence exists?
• Can we identify the time frame associated with the posting of the offending content?
• How much of the offending content exists across the entire social networking platform?
• Is there other content that supports interpretation of the relevant content?
• How accurate is the reported physical location?

Security issues that are associated with social networking sites are:

• Corporate espionage
• Cross site scripting
• Virus and Worms
• Social networking site aggregators
• Phishing
• Network infiltration leading to data leakage
• ID theft
• Cyberbullying
• Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR)
• Spam
• Stalking

Suryateja Pericherla

Suryateja Pericherla, at present is a Research Scholar (full-time Ph.D.) in the Dept. of Computer Science & Systems Engineering at Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. Previously worked as an Associate Professor in the Dept. of CSE at Vishnu Institute of Technology, India.

He has 11+ years of teaching experience and is an individual researcher whose research interests are Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Computer Security, Network Security and Blockchain.

He is a member of professional societies like IEEE, ACM, CSI and ISCA. He published several research papers which are indexed by SCIE, WoS, Scopus, Springer and others.