Detection and prevention of Profile Cloning in Online Social Networks

Online Social Networking sites are getting much popular day by day. Well known sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ have millions of users across the globe. With the wide popularity there are lot of security and privacy threats to the users of Online Social Networks (OSN) such as breach of privacy, viral marketing, structural attacks, malware attacks and Profile Cloning. Profile Cloning is the identity theft of existing user´s profile credentials and create a fake profile using these credentials. Further this profile is misused for defaming the legitimate profile owner as well as sending false friend requests to his friends. In this paper we discuss a few outcomes of our survey and an experiment performed on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ for detecting Profile Cloning using a methodology designed by us. We suggested some countermeasures that can be followed by the users as well as OSN providers to protect the users from profile cloning attacks.