Social engineering in social networking sites : affect-based model

While social engineering represents a real and ominous threat to many organizations, companies, governments, and individuals, social networking sites (SNSs), have been identified as among the most common means of social engineering attacks. Owing to factors that reduce the ability of users to detect social engineering tricks and increase the ability of attackers to launch them, SNSs seem to be perfect breeding ground for exploiting the vulnerabilities of people, and the weakest link in security. This work will contribute to the knowledge of social engineering by identifying different entities and subentities that affect social engineering based attacks in SNSs. Moreover, this paper includes an intensive and comprehensive overview of different aspects of social engineering threats in SNSs.