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INDEX

Sr. No. Topic Name Page No.

1 Abstract 6

2 Introduction 7

3 Problem Statement 8

4 Proposed System 9

5 Implementation 10

6 Summary 11

7 Conclusion 12

8 References 13
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ABSTRACT

Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ have attracted millions of users in the last
years. One of the most widely used social networks, Facebook, recently had an initial public offering
(IPO) in May 2012, which was among the biggest in Internet technology. For-profit and nonprofit
organizations primarily use such platforms for target-oriented advertising and large-scale marketing
campaigns. Social networks have attracted worldwide attention because of their potential to address
millions of users and possible future customers. The potential of social networks is often misused by
malicious users who extract sensitive private information of unaware users.
One of the most common ways of performing a large-scale data harvesting attack is the use of fake
profiles, where malicious users present themselves in profiles impersonating fictitious or real persons.
The main goal of this research is to evaluate the implications of fake user profiles on Facebook. To do so,
we established a comprehensive data harvesting attack, the social engineering experiment, and analyzed
the interactions between fake profiles and regular users to eventually undermine the Facebook business
model. Furthermore, privacy considerations are analyzed using focus groups. As a result of our work, we
provided a set of countermeasures to increase the awareness of users.
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INTRODUCTION

In recent years, online social networks such as Facebook, Twitter an Google+ have become a global
mass phenomenon and one of the fastest emerging e-services according to Gross and Acquisti (2005) and
Boyd and Ellison (2007). A study recently published by Facebook (2012) indicates that there were about
901 million monthly active users on the platform at the end of March 2012. Therefore, Facebook is one of
the largest online social networks. Not only common users but also celebrities, politicians and other people
of public interest use
social media to spread content to others. Furthermore, companies and organizations consider social media
sites the medium of choice for large-scale marketing and target-oriented advertising campaigns.
The sustainability of the business model relies on several different factors and is usually not publicly
disclosed. Nonetheless, we assume that two major aspects are significant for Facebook. First and foremost,
Facebook relies on people using their real-life identity and therefore discourages the use of pseudonyms.
Verified accounts allow (prominent) users to verify their identity and to continue using pseudonyms, e.g.,
stage names such as ‘Gaga’. This is considered to be a security mechanism against fake accounts
(TechCrunch 2012); moreover, users are asked to identify friends who do not use their real names.
Second, the revenue generated by advertising is substantial and thus protection of the revenue
streams is important. Media reports (TechCrunch 2012) have indicated that a large portion of clicks are not
genuine clicks by real users. In the short term, Facebook does not suffer from bot-click attacks but instead
benefits from increased revenue, so there may be no incentive to prevent such fraud. In the long run,
however, advertisers will move away from the platform if the promised targeted advertisements are not
delivered correctly.
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PROBLEM STATEMENT

Even though most of the social networks have already added privacy setting features for each post,
however, still any private information can be leaked. Let’s say a post like a picture is on a user profile and user
have set the e privacy for the picture to be seen just for one of user’s friends and user think it’s totally safe. But
there is no guarantee that user’s friend will not share your picture with anyone else, means that user’s friend can
easily save picture and upload it somewhere or share it with someone else without any notification to user.
The users don’t care much about what they are sharing on social networks and the privacy of their post, it
can be quite troublesome for them. On top of all benefits of online social networks, there are many
disadvantages identity theft is one of the biggest concerns of online social networks. There are millions of fake
profiles, which maliciously manipulate or harm other people and the reason for this matter is that it is very
simple and quite fast to create and form a fake profile b using other’s information or picture and Use social
engineering techniques to steal information.
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PROPOSED SYSTEM

Detection and identifying fake profiles and botnets in social networks are restricted to user’s
report and just subsequent to a number of reports for particular user; the system will check the
validation of user. In the proposed approach, steganography techniques and methods will be used to
detect and identify such fake profiles. In this method, at any time a user uploads his/her pictures, some
exclusive and useful information such as email or username and also date of upload would be attached
to pictures by means of watermarking methods. Accordingly, in future, if somebody else saves that
picture and attempts to create a fake profile with stolen data, the system is able to automatically detect
this deception and fraud and would prevent and protect the fake user from any additional positive
action.
Our proposed system invokes discrete wavelet transform algorithm for data hiding. Thus, this
would prevent the clone attacks and providing complete user data privacy preserving. Also, when
users upload the profile picture or photos it would be watermarked and updated. For watermarking
technique Java static watermarking systems and algorithms has been used. Any fake users updating the
same profile picture can be detected and their respective IP would be tracked and blocked. Also in our
project to provide secure authentication we have invoked certain attributes which can be asked to the
users during registration. Thus we can able to avoid clone attacks in social media networks
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3 : IMPLEMENTATION

 Social network - which can be asked to the users during registration. By getting the permission from the
original user only, the other user can download his/her profile pictures and shared pictures. Majorities of
social networks have weak user authentication method, which is based on some basic information like
displayed name, photo. These weaknesses make it effortless to misuse user’s information and do identity.

 Java static marking - Watermarking is the process of hiding digital information in a carrier signal. In
this method, anyone tries to download his/her profile picture need to get the permission from the original
user. IF Original user allow the other user to download his/her own picture. The watermarking technique
will remove, and picture will be downloaded automatically.

 Static watermarking: Static software watermarks are stored in the application executable itself. For
example, this could be stored in the executable or in the string resources. There are two types of static
watermarks namely data and code.
 Java watermarking: Java programs distributed on the internet are having serious problem with the
copyright infringement. Java decompiles such as Mocha can be used to decompose class files into source
files. Many of the solution available are either commercial or research-oriented such as SandMark. An
example commercial application is Dasho created by preemptive solution which inserts watermarks into
source code
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SUMMARY

In this proposed system, data hiding techniques to hide some information in profile pictures in
order to detect botnets and fake profiles and finally will propose an automated model to detect fake
profiles and botnets instead of current manual method which is costly and labor-intensive. This project
presents a classification and analysis of detection mechanisms of clone attacks on online social
network, based on attribute similarity, friend network similarity, profile analysis for a time interval and
record of Internet Protocol sequences.
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4 : CONCLUSION

We conducted a social engineering experiment on Facebook and determined factors that contribute
to the successful integration of a fake profile into an existing friendship network. Furthermore, we have
human behaviour and interaction between common user profiles and our fake profiles and described the
patterns we found. We also demonstrated that profiles that do not display social activities and a high
number of friends are more likely to be perceived as fake than profiles that display social activities and
interactions with others. Moreover, we examined Facebook users’ privacy considerations and gained a
deeper understanding of the connection between fake users and common users. In the end, we discussed the
correlation between the number of registered profiles and the correctness of the user data and its impacts
on the Facebook business model. In this work, we also proposed a training method to increase user
awareness as a valid countermeasure.
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5 : REFERENCES

1] Vayansky, Ike & Kumar, Sathish. (2018). Phishing – challenges and solutions. Computer Fraud &
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2] Alqatawna, Ja’far & Madain, Alia & Al-Zoubi, Ala & AlSayyed, Rizik. (2017). Online Social
Networks Security: Threats, Attacks, and Future Directions. 10.1007/978-3-319-55354-2_10.

3] Jain, Neelesh & Shrivastava, Vibhash & , Professor & Professor, Assistant. (2014). "CYBER
CRIME CHANGING EVERYTHING – AN EMPIRICAL STUDY". [4] AKhonji, Mahmoud &
Iraqi, Youssef & Jones, Andy. (2013). Phishing Detection: A Literature Survey. IEEE
Communications Surveys & Tutorials. PP. 1-31. 10.1109/SURV.2013.032213.00009.

4] C. C. Wagner, S. Mitter, proprietor of C. K• and M. Strohmaier. Attacking social bots: modeling

user susceptibility in online social networks. In WWW Proceedings, volume 12, 2012.

5] G. Kontaxis, I. Polakis, S. Ioannidis, E.P. Markatos. Detecting cloning of social network profiles. In
Workshops on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PERCOM Workshops), 2011 IEEE
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