A Summary of Granular Computing System Vulnerabilities: Exploring the Dark Side of Social Networking Communities

Online social networking communities are connecting hundreds of millions of individuals across the globe and facilitating new modes of interaction. Due to their immense popularity, an important question is whether these communities are safe for their users. In our encyclopedia article, we address this safety question and show that social networking communities are susceptible to numerous attacks. In this paper, we summarize two broad attack classes: traditional attacks that have been adapted to these communities (e.g., malware propagation, spam, and phishing) and new attacks that have emerged through malicious social networking profiles (e.g., rogue advertising profiles and impersonating profiles).