Redes sociais virtuais como ambiente de exposição de dados pessoais para a engenharia social

Abstract

Virtual social networks are attracting Internet users and their popularization also increases the flow of personal information exposed by people to untrained use these environments. Facebook is the largest virtual social network of all, and so it was chosen for this work related to information security. We performed a qualitative study of thirty people from a specific universe through questionnaires, interviews and the analysis of their social pages on Facebook. The attitude and behavior of these people in the social network were confronted with Kevin Mitnick´s social engineering techniques. The result of this comparison is presented using indices that show the amount of sensitive information that users present in the social network as well as their level of vulnerability to possible attacks from a social engineer. The result of the analysis showed that the vast majority of people end up putting their safety at risk because of inappropriate behavior in the social network.