Social Engineering Attacks on Facebook – A Case Study

Abstract

Background/Purpose: Facebook is an American business that offer online social networking services. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Harvard University freshmen Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Free access to Facebook enables new users to create profiles, upload photos to existing groups, and start new ones. Every user's profile page has a Timeline area where they can upload material and their social network connections may reply with messages and Status updates informing them of their current location or condition. Additionally, Facebook includes a function called News Feed that notifies users of updates to their friends' profiles and statuses. Users can communicate with one another and exchange private messages using Facebook Messenger. Additionally, Facebook users may express their approval of a type of content by clicking the "Like" button. Every day, more than a billion people use Facebook, making it the most common social network on the planet. Menlo Park, California, is where the company's headquarters are located. Objective: To analyse how Facebook is misused and turned into an attack platform, in order to get sensitive information that can be used to create an attack profile against an individual. Design/Methodology/Approach: SWOT framework is being used to analyse and display information gathered from scholarly publications, web articles, and other sources. Findings/Results: Social Engineering Attacks using Facebook help the attackers to steal sensitive private information from unaware users. Using a false profile is one of the most frequent techniques to execute a large-scale data harvesting attack. Cyber Criminals use Facebook as the main target for social engineering attacks because of its high number of users and popularity. Originality/Value: This paper study gives a brief overview of Social Engineering Attacks on Facebook based on a variety of data collected. Paper Type: Case study-based Research Analysis