Online Social Network Information Forensics: A Survey on Use of Various Tools and Determining How Cautious Facebook Users are?

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSN) such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram are heavily used to socialize, entertain or gain insights on people behavior and their activities. Everyday terabytes of data is generated over these networks, which is then used by the businesses to generate revenue or misused by the wrongdoers to exploit vulnerabilities of these social network platforms. Specifically social network information helps in extracting various important features such as; user association, access pattern, location information etc. Recent research shows, many such features could be used to develop novel attack models and investigate further into defending the users from exposing their information to outsiders. This paper analyzes some of the available tools to extract OSN information and discusses research work on similar type of unstructured data. Recent research works, which focus on gathering bits and pieces of information to extract meaningful results for digital forensics, has been discussed. An online survey is conducted to gauge the cautiousness of users in social media usage in terms of personal information dissemination.