Security Analysis on Social Media Networks via STRIDE Model

Abstract: Security associated threats are often increased for online social media during a pandemic, such as COVID-19, along with changes in a work environment. For example, employees in many companies and organizations have started to work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Such working style has increased many remote activities and further relied on email for communication, thus creating an ideal condition for email fraud schemes. Motivated by this observation, the main purpose of this work is to evaluate the privacy policy of online social media and identify potential security associated problems. First, we perform a risk analysis of online social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn by using the STRIDE model. This aims to find threats and vulnerabilities in the online social media. Then in this analysis, the phishing attack was found to be a main threat in online social media, which is a social engineering attack, where users are convinced through some fake messages or emails to extract their personal credentials.