In recent years, virtual meeting technology has become a part of the everyday lives of more and more people, often with the help of global online social networks (OSNs). These help users to build both social and professional links on a worldwide scale. The sharing of information and opinions are important features of OSNs. Users can describe recent activities and interests, share photos, videos, applications, and much more. The use of OSNs has increased at a rapid rate. Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Sina Weibo, VKontakte, and Mixi are all OSNs that have become the preferred way of communication for a vast number of daily active users. Users spend substantial amounts of time updating their information, communicating with other users, and browsing one another’s accounts. OSNs obliterate geographical distance and can breach economic barrier. This popularity has made OSNs a fascinating test bed for cyberattacks comprising Cross-Site Scripting, SQL injection, DDoS, phishing, spamming, fake profile, spammer, etc. OSNs security: Principles, Algorithm, Applications, and Perspectives describe various attacks, classifying them, explaining their consequences, and offering. It also highlights some key contributions related to the current defensive approaches. Moreover, it shows how machine-learning and deep-learning methods can mitigate attacks on OSNs. Different technological solutions that have been proposed are also discussed. The topics, methodologies, and outcomes included in this book will help readers learn the importance of incentives in any technical solution to handle attacks against OSNs. The best practices and guidelines will show how to implement various attack-mitigation methodologies.

Security and Privacy in Social Networks brings to the forefront innovative approaches for analyzing and enhancing the security and privacy dimensions in online social networks, and is the first comprehensive attempt dedicated entirely to this field. In order to facilitate the transition of such methods from theory to mechanisms designed and deployed in existing online social networking services, the book aspires to create a common language between the researchers and practitioners of this new area- spanning from the theory of computational social sciences to conventional security and network engineering.

The enormous success and diffusion that online social networks (OSNs) are encountering nowadays is vastly apparent. Users' social interactions now occur using online social media as communication channels; personal information and activities are easily exchanged both for recreational and business purposes in order to obtain social or economic advantages. In this scenario, OSNs are considered critical applications with respect to the security of users and their resources, for their characteristics alone: the large amount of personal information they manage, big economic upturn connected to their commercial use, strict interconnection among users and resources characterizing them, as well as user attitude to easily share private data and activities with strangers. In this book, we discuss three main research topics connected to security in online social networks: (i) trust management, because trust can be intended as a measure of the perception of security (in terms of risks/benefits) that users in an OSN have with respect to other (unknown/little-known) parties; (ii) controlled information sharing, because in OSNs, where personal information is not only connected to user profiles, but spans across users' social activities and interactions, users must be provided with the possibility to directly control information flows; and (iii) identity management, because OSNs are subjected more and more to malicious attacks that, with respect to traditional ones, have the advantage of being more effective by leveraging the social network as a new medium for reaching victims. For each of these research topics, in this book we provide both theoretical concepts as well as an overview of the main solutions that commercial/non-commercial actors have proposed over the years. We also discuss some of the most promising research directions in these fields.

The main target of this book is to raise the awareness about social networking systems design, implementation, security requirements, and approaches. The book entails related issues including computing, engineering, security, management, and organization policy. It interprets the design, implementation and security threats in the social networks and offers some solutions in this concern. It clarifies the authentication concept between servers to identity users. Most of the models that focus on protecting users’ information are also included. This book introduces the Human-Interactive Security Protocols (HISPs) efficiently. Presenting different types of the social networking systems including the internet and mobile devices is one of the main targets of this book. This book includes the social network performance evaluation metrics. It compares various models and approaches used in the design of the social networks. This book includes various applications for the use of the social networks in the healthcare, e-commerce, crisis management, and academic applications. The book provides an extensive background for the development of social network science and its challenges. This book discusses the social networks integration to offer online services, such as instant messaging, email, file sharing, transferring patients’ medical reports/images, location-based recommendations and many other functions. This book provides users, designers, engineers and managers with the valuable knowledge to build a better secured information transfer over the social networks. The book gathers remarkable materials from an international experts’ panel to guide the readers during the analysis, design, implementation and security achievement for the social network systems. In this book, theories, practical guidance, and challenges are included to inspire designers and researchers. The book guides the engineers, designers, and researchers to exploit the intrinsic design of the social network systems.

The social benefit derived from Online Social Networks (OSNs) can lure users to reveal unprecedented volumes of personal data to an online audience that is much less trustworthy than their offline social circle. Even if a user hides his personal data from some users and shares with others, privacy settings of OSNs may be bypassed, thus leading to various privacy harms such as identity theft, stalking, or discrimination. Therefore, users need to be assisted in understanding the privacy risks of their OSN profiles as well as managing their privacy settings so as to keep such risks in check, while still deriving the benefits of social network participation. This book presents to its readers how privacy risk analysis concepts such as privacy harms and risk sources can be used to develop mechanisms for privacy scoring of user profiles and for supporting users in privacy settings management in the context of OSNs. Privacy scoring helps detect and minimize the risks due to the dissemination and use of personal data. The book also discusses many open problems in this area to encourage further research.

In recent years, virtual meeting technology has become a part of the everyday lives of more and more people, often with the help of global online social networks (OSNs). These help users to build both social and professional links on a worldwide scale. The sharing of information and opinions are important features of OSNs. Users can describe recent activities and interests, share photos, videos, applications, and much more. The use of OSNs has increased at a rapid rate. Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Sina Weibo, VKontakte, and Mixi are all OSNs that have become the preferred way of communication for a vast number of daily active users. Users spend substantial amounts of time updating their information, communicating with other users, and browsing one another’s accounts. OSNs obliterate geographical distance and can breach economic barrier. This popularity has made OSNs a fascinating test bed for cyberattacks comprising Cross-Site Scripting, SQL injection, DDoS, phishing, spamming, fake profile, spammer, etc. OSNs security: Principles, Algorithm, Applications, and Perspectives describe various attacks, classifying them, explaining their consequences, and offering. It also highlights some key contributions related to the current defensive approaches. Moreover, it shows how machine-learning and deep-learning methods can mitigate attacks on OSNs. Different technological solutions that have been proposed are also discussed. The topics, methodologies, and outcomes included in this book will help readers learn the importance of incentives in any technical solution to handle attacks against OSNs. The best practices and guidelines will show how to implement various attack-mitigation methodologies.

This book is the second of three volumes that illustrate the concept of social networks from a computational point of view. The book contains contributions from a international selection of world-class experts, concentrating on topics relating to security and privacy (the other two volumes review Tools, Perspectives, and Applications, and Mining and Visualization in CSNs). Topics and features: presents the latest advances in security and privacy issues in CSNs, and illustrates how both organizations and individuals can be protected from real-world threats; discusses the design and use of a wide range of computational tools and software for social network analysis; describes simulations of social networks, and the representation and analysis of social networks, with a focus on issues of security, privacy, and anonymization; provides experience reports, survey articles, and intelligence techniques and theories relating to specific problems in network technology.

This synthesis lecture provides a survey of work on privacy in online social networks (OSNs). This work encompasses concerns of users as well as service providers and third parties. Our goal is to approach such concerns from a computer-science perspective, and building upon existing work on privacy, security, statistical modeling and databases to provide an overview of the technical and algorithmic issues related to privacy in OSNs. We start our survey by introducing a simple OSN data model and describe common statistical-inference techniques that can be used to infer potentially sensitive information. Next, we describe some privacy definitions and privacy mechanisms for data publishing. Finally, we describe a set of recent techniques for modeling, evaluating, and managing individual users' privacy risk within the context of OSNs. Table of Contents: Introduction / A Model for Online Social Networks / Types of Privacy Disclosure / Statistical Methods for Inferring Information in Networks / Anonymity and Differential Privacy / Attacks and Privacy-preserving Mechanisms / Models of Information Sharing / Users' Privacy Risk / Management of Privacy Settings

Analyzing and Securing Social Networks focuses on the two major technologies that have been developed for online social networks (OSNs): (i) data mining technologies for analyzing these networks and extracting useful information such as location, demographics, and sentiments of the participants of the network, and (ii) security and privacy technolo

Social networks, particularly public ones, have become part of the fabric of how we communicate and collaborate as a society. With value from micro-level personal networking to macro-level outreach, social networking has become pervasive in people's lives and is now becoming a significant driving force in business. These new platforms have provided new approaches to many critical enterprise functions, including identifying, communicating, and gathering feedback with customers (e.g., Facebook, Ning); locating expertise (e.g., LinkedIn); providing new communication platforms (e.g., Twitter); and collaborating with a community, small or large (e.g., wikis). However, many organizations have stayed away from potential benefits of social networks because of the significant risks associated with them. This book will help an organization understand the risks present in social networks and provide a framework covering policy, training and technology to address those concerns and mitigate the risks presented to leverage social media in their organization. The book also acknowledges that many organizations have already exposed themselves to more risk than they think from social networking and offers strategies for "dialing it back" to retake control. Defines an organization's goals for social networking Presents the risks present in social networking and how to mitigate them Explains how to maintain continuous social networking security.