For the next year and a half I will be writing a dissertation or thesis paper.  Now my professor has dubbed this a master’s dissertation written for an undergrad degree.  Although I don’t get a master’s degree at the end of this paper, I will at least have a thick pile of paper that I can present to my employers and universities that I apply to for my master’s degree.

Once I came to terms with spending the latter part of my undergraduate term researching and writing this paper I had to decide on a topic.  Two things that interest me most, as seen in my previous posts, are viral intrusions and social engineering.  The parts that intrigue me most about viral intrusions are how they get in, what they take, and why.  Lately, I have been doing a lot of work on social networking which does tie into social engineering.

Now to put these two together, I have come up with the topic of “Forensic Reconnaissance of Social Networking Attacks”.

What does this mean you ask?  Well forensic reconnaissance is done once a crime has taken place.  A forensics team goes into a crime scene, takes the finger prints, in our case digital, searches for evidence and presents this evidence to the crown attorney and they choose whether to press charges or not.

Attacks on social networking websites have become more prevalent in recent months as identity thieves try to find new ways to gather information of their victims.  The SANS top 20 has described social networking as a key factor in their description of a real life HTTP client side exploitation example.

I hope to combine these two topics to see how attackers use social networking websites, what information they gather, and the application of the information they gain.  This paper will hopefully dive into the psyche of an attacker and examine previous cases of social networking attacks to give the defenders a better understanding of how to be proactive in protecting themselves.

Stay tuned and enjoy!

Dissertation