Study of Security Vulnerabilities in Social Networking Websites

Social networking Websites (SNW's) have billions of active users who communicate and share their personal and business related information every day. The growing popularity of these websites has become a favorite place for attackers. Attackers use the SNW's vulnerabilities to access users’ personal or business information. Vulnerability is weakness or flaw in the social network infrastructure which can be used by an attacker to harm the system, access the information, disturb its normal operations and use it for own financial or competitive benefits of for criminal activities crime or other motives. The main objective of this paper is to describe network and privacy related SNWs vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities that are mainly used attackers are also highlighted in this paper. The paper presents a broad view of SNWs vulnerabilities to the researchers who are interested in improving security measures of social media services.