Detecting Profile Cloning Attack in Social Networks

الملخص

Profile cloning, one of the most common forms of digital identity fraud, refers to the intentional imitation of a user's personal social network accounts by creating a false one in order to make a fake account. This manipulative approach takes advantage of the trust and interrelation properties of SNS architecture to facilitate various cyber-attacks, such as impersonation, social engineering, phishing, and false information campaigns and fake news. Herein, we present an extensive discussion on the phenomenon of profile cloning. It starts with an introduction explaining profile cloning and differentiating it from related attacks such as identity theft or catfishing. The paper goes on by outlining the primary cloning methods, Friend-List-based Cloning and Full-Profile Cloning. It examines both the primary motives that drive the perpetrators with anything from financial fraud and societal sabotage, all the way to espionage and vendettas. Key to this analysis is its focus on the multi-faceted effects upon victims, organizations, and social media in general, as well as on the psychological, financial, and reputational impacts. The paper then provides an overview of detection methods and how various approaches cover user-centric methods, feature-based machine learning methods, and graph-based analytical methods. It also analyses the legal and ethical systems today and describes problems with jurisdictional enforcement and platform accountability. In conclusion, the paper synthesizes proactive and strategic mitigating approaches by users, SNS providers, and the policy community in order to find that a multi-stakeholder response by means of high-tech detection, robust legal representation, and ongoing teaching and promoting digital literacy is critical to the efforts of responding to the growing threat posed to online identity and trust.