Social Networking Sites: A New Platform for Botnets A Short Case Study to prove that“How Today's Social Networking is a New Platform for Cyber Criminals”

With increasing global reliance on the Internet as a medium to transmit information comes an increased risk of cyber-attack. Social networking sites are the most popular tools in internet for social interaction between the people. Online social networks (OSNs) have rapidly become a prominent and widely used service, offering a wealth of personal and sensitive information with significant security and privacy implications. They provide a convenient and accessible platform for people who want to exchange thoughts or words via the internet. Since friends on social networking sites have confirmed one another and trust one another, these people will be more unaware of the potential dangers that can come from messages/e-mails/links. When such dangers are neglected by people, internet security related cases will undoubtedly rise. As the technology is growing, hackers are also using the latest technology for malicious purposes i.e. Technology changed from traditional virus to Botnet and Root kits. Very recently, Botmaster have begun to exploit Social network websites (such as facebook.com; twitter.com etc.) as their C&C (command and control) infrastructures, which turns out to be quite stealthy because it is hard to distinguish the C&C activities from the normal Social networking traffic. Recently Fast-flux network (FFN) based Botnets (Social Bot) hacked four lacsfacebook accounts alone in Bangalore in November 2011 and 60 lacslinkedIn password