Social network security: issues, challenges, threats, and solutions

Networks are very popular in today’s world. Millions of people use various forms of social networks as they allow individuals to connect with friends and family, and share private information. However, issues related to maintaining the privacy and security of a user’s information can occur, especially when the user’s uploaded content is multimedia, such as photos, videos, and audios. Uploaded multimedia content carries information that can be transmitted virally and almost instantaneously within a social networking site and beyond. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of different security and privacy threats that target every user of social networking sites. In addition, we separately focus on various threats that arise due to the sharing of multimedia content within a social networking site. We also discuss current state-of- the-art defense solutions that can protect social network users from these threats. We then present future direction and discuss some easy-to-apply response techniques to achieve the goal of a trustworthy and secure social network ecosystem.