4.1. Online social networks (OSNs)
While the more traditional forms of social engineering use
information collected through dumpster diving or phone calls,
OSNs contain a wealth of personal information that can be
misused as an initial source for social engineering attacks.
Huber et al. were among the first researchers to argue that
OSNs enable automated social engineering (ASE) attacks
(Huber et al., 2009) because information harvested from OSNs
is easy to process. The authors showed that information on
employees of a given target company can be collected in an
automated fashion and potentially misused for automated
social engineering. Reverse social engineering describes a
particular social engineering technique where an attacker
lures the victim into initiating the conversion as described in
Section 2.2.3. Irani et al. (2011) argue that OSNs enable reverse
social engineering attacks and describe three potential attack
vectors. The authors evaluated their proposed attack vectors
on three different OSNs: recommendation-based reverse social
engineering on Facebook, demographic-based reverse
social engineering on Badoo and visitor-tracking-based
reverse social engineering on Friendster. Their results show
that reverse social engineering attacks are feasible in practice
and can be automated by exploiting the features of current
online social networks. While social spam is usually sent via
an OSN's primary communication channel, attackers who
harvest information can also send traditional e-mail messages
to deliver spam because users provide their e-mail addresses
on their profiles. If spam is delivered via traditional email
instead of OSN platforms, these malicious messages
cannot be detected by the OSN's provider. Balduzzi et al. (2010)
showed that OSNs can be misused for automated user
profiling, to validate large sets of e-mail addresses and to
collect additional personal information corresponding to
these sets.