Friend or faux? engineering your social network to detect fraudulent profiles

Social media has a tremendous impact on current culture and trends. It has revolutionized the way in which people communicate with one another. Malicious entities exploit the vulnerabilities brought upon by the availability of personal data content on these networks. Openly sharing personal information online can make a user vulnerable to threats such as identity theft, phishing attacks, and profile cloning. In this paper, we will report on our investigation of malicious threats on social networks. We will propose a simple yet effective methodology for detecting fraudulent profiles on Facebook, a social networking service.