Security Threats and Techniques in Social Networking Sites: A Systematic Literature Review

During the decade, interactions among people have gradually changed as a result of the popularity, availability and accessibility of social networking sites (SNSs). SNSs enhance our lives in terms of relaxation, knowledge, and communication. On the other hand, the information security and privacy of SNS users have been threatened with most users not aware of this fact. The rate of cyber-attack committed via SNS is dramatically high. Finding a solution to provide better security for social network users has become a major challenge. This review is conducted with the objective to collect and investigate all credible and effective researches that have studied security problems and solutions on SNSs. We aim to extract and discuss the prominent security features and techniques in the selected research articles to provide researchers and practitioners with a concise collection of the security solutions. In this review, we conduct a secondary study by accessing the previous studies devoted to security threats of SNSs and new security techniques to protect them from attacks. We apply the standard guidelines of systematic literature review by working thoroughly on 84 previous studies including journal papers and conference proceedings published in high impact journals. The results show that 2013 is the peak period in which security problems on SNSs obtained attentions from researchers and 23 significant security problems in SNSs were discovered. Facebook and Twitter are the two SNSs mostly referred to by researchers regarding security problems. We found that people (users) and SNSs themselves are the two main causes for today’s security and privacy issues on SNSs. In conclusion, the security and privacy issues on SNSs are still an unsolved problem and there is as yet no solid and complete solution for absolutely removing those issues on SNSs.

@article{Norman2018,
  title     = {Security Threats and Techniques in Social Networking Sites: A Systematic Literature Review},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {9},
  number    = {1},
  year      = {2018},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Azah Norman and Maw Maw and Suraya Hamid and Suraya Ika Tamrin},
  doi       = {10.14569/SpecialIssue.2018.0901114},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/SpecialIssue.2018.0901114}
}