document: All your contacts are belong to us : automated identity theft attacks on social networks Social networking sites have been increasingly gaining popularity . Well-known sites such as Facebook have been reporting growth rates as high as 3 % per week . Many social networking sites have millions of registered users who use these sites to share photographs , contact long-lost friends , establish new business contacts and to keep in touch . In this paper , we investigate how easy it would be for a potential attacker to launch automated crawling and identity theft attacks against a number of popular social networking sites in order to gain access to a large volume of personal user information . The first attack we present is the automated identity theft of existing user profiles and sending of friend requests to the contacts of the cloned victim . The hope , from the attacker 's point of view , is that the contacted users simply trust and accept the friend request . By establishing a friendship relationship with the contacts of a victim , the attacker is able to access the sensitive personal information provided by them . In the second , more advanced attack we present , we show that it is effective and feasible to launch an automated , cross-site profile cloning attack . In this attack , we are able to automatically create a forged profile in a network where the victim is not registered yet and contact the victim 's friends who are registered on both networks . Our experimental results with real users show that the automated attacks we present are effective and feasible in practice .
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