Now for the second part. The primary question is how do I salvage social networking attacks. I needed to transform this into a new analysis.

In my research I found a few papers written on what can happen and what they do. However, I noticed that the severity of social engineering attacks are not being seen by as many security administrators as it could be.  I checked a few of the top rankings of threats and the threat of the human factor or social engineering was not in their top ranks. I believe that for the next decade, at least, social engineering will be a top threat that IT security administrators will need to look at.

Therefore, in my new approach to my paper I hope to start by defining the anatomy of a severe attack and then describe how social engineering fits that model.

My thesis will have to be a hypothesis that claims that the severity of social engineering attacks will make these attacks a top threat for IT security administrators for at least the next decade.

The phrasing needs some work but I think I finally have a working thesis that can be applied to my dissertation.

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!