Socio-Technical Attack Approximation Based on Structural Virality of Information in Social Networks

A free and easily accessible platform for sharing information over social media has its negatives. It is being misused to intimidate others by exploiting the trust factor inherent within it. This paper is on the persistent pursuit of offering an exquisite solution to address this possible misuse of social media also called STAs and their subsequent impacts on society. These attacks are very sensitive to society and often organized groups with a high skill set are involved to disguise the security agencies. In this work, a model has been proposed to approximate socio-technical attack subject to the structural virality of information in the social network. The work is unique in the sense that previous works are mostly based on statistical values of the network but the proposed work considers the latent structure of the network which is not being reflected from their statistical values. This also paves the way for future researchers to implant other hidden features of nodes and messages circulating within the network which could be helpful for the detection and mitigation of STAs.