Social Media Safety & Security
Create a Safe and Secure Social Media App. Protect your users from cyber threats, enforce mechanisms to keep user accounts and privacy safe, monitor and block harmful content and empower users to take collective action against malicious actors.
Secure your App from Cyber Threats
A social media application, which is open to public, is vulnerable to several kinds of cyber attacks.
A hacker or an attacker might
Try to gain access to another users account (or impersonate another person) and act maliciously including posting objectionable content
Try to guess account passwords through brute-force (repeatedly trying different combinations)
Try to gain access to the platform database and steal user data and sensitive information (including credit card and financial information)
Overwhelm and bring down our application servers with coordinated attacks
Trick other users into clicking on malicious links
Mimic humans through bots and automated software
We use several tools and techniques and follow security best practices to keep our platform safe from all forms of cyber threats and cyber attacks.
Encrypt all data during transmission to and from the servers (using HTTPS)
Store all sensitive data in the databases in encrypted format and If possible avoid storing sensitive data altogether.
Implement access control mechanisms throughout the applications. Ensure identity and ownership before providing access to any data.
Validate, filter and sanitise all user supplied data to prevent unauthorised access by injection of malicious data.
Enforce rate limits to server and data access requests and prevent automated and denial of service attacks.
Segment and containerise the infrastructure components and prevent unauthorised access using firewalls and security rules.
Provide administrate control to deactivate malicious users and terminate session on the fly.
Clear all cached data and session state upon logout.
Use up-to-date, strong cryptographic algorithms, protocols and keys for encryption.
Keep all server components, modules, frameworks and library versions up-to-date with latest security updates.
Follow security best practices throughout the software development life cycle and deployment process.
Thoroughly test the system for potential vulnerabilities before deploying to production.
Log all login, access control and validation failures and alert admin to identify and block suspicious and malicious accounts.
Establish audit trail for all sensitive transactions so that forensics can be conducted and action taken on suspicious or malicious user activity.
Keep User Accounts Safe and Secure
A social media user account is at the risk of being compromised. A hacker might be able to guess a user password if it is a weak or well-known. He might also crack the password using brute force algorithms that try different possible combinations in quick succession. Users might use the same password across multiple sites. If the password is stolen from other sites, an attacker could use it to gain access to ours. We need to implement a comprehensive policy and framework to keep our users’ account safe and secure.
Check for weak passwords during registration and while changing passwords. Don’t allow well known passwords and passwords used by the user in the past. Don’t transmit and store passwords in clear text to the server. Use a salted hashing algorithm to obscure the password before transmission and storage in the database.
Don’t allow repeated login attempts in quick succession. Limit the number of retries or allow retries only after exponentially adding delays. Log the authentication failures and alert admin and users of any hacking attempt in progress. Secure the forgot password and change password process from exploitation.
Typically a user session begins when the user logins and ends when he log outs. A session id or token is generated after successful login and is used for access control during the session. Secure your session, by randomly generating session tokens and refresh them periodically. Invalidate the session tokens on logout or after idle time periods.
Empower Users to Take Action
Social media is a public space, and it’s essential to protect users from harassment, intimidation, bullying, trolling, spamming, and scams. We must empower users to take action against malicious or harmful behaviour and foster a safe and secure environment. Key tools to achieve this include enabling users to block and report inappropriate posts and accounts.
Reporting
A user should be able to report a post, if he finds it inappropriate. He could report a user too for bad behaviour such as harassment, intimation or promoting violence or indulging in spam or scam. In such case the platform software could take the first level of action and escalate to admin if a review by a human is needed.
For a reported post, the software could inform the author about the report and ask him to take corrective action - to either delete the post or edit and resubmit. If multiple people report the same post, then the software can completely block or limit the reach of the post until reviewed by admin.
For reported users, the software could block or limit the interaction between the two users and escalate to admin if multiple people report the same user. Admin could review the users actions and either suspend the account temporarily (he can still login, but can’t post or interact with others) or completely deactivate the account.
Blocking
People should also be able to block other users. It is a signal to the platform to stop showing any more posts from that user and block all forms of communication between them. Blocked users should not be able to send them chat messages, or comment on posts or even find them in search results.
A user blocked by multiple others, is an indication to the platform that the user could be malicious. The admin could review the users actions and take an appropriate action to suspend or deactivate the user.
People can block posts too, signalling the platform that they don’t like to see this and similar posts.
Block Harmful and Obscene Content
Social media should encourage free speech, but at the same time prevent profanity, hate speech, and content promoting violent, criminal behaviour or self harm. Users can be empowered with tools like reporting and blocking, allowing the community to collectively act against such content. However, we could take a proactive approach and filter such harmful content at the outset and prevent users from posting it altogether.
A basic approach is to look for undesirable words or phrases in posts and flag them for moderation before disseminating to other users. A more advanced solution is to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning models to perform sentiment analysis on the post and identify harmful content, which can then be sent for moderation to an admin.
AI can also analyze images and videos in posts or profile pictures to detect violence, nudity, or sexual content, blocking such materials before they are published.
Protect User Privacy
The power of social media is in finding interesting people, connecting with them and engaging in meaningful conversations. Social media helps discover people in various ways. It displays user information in: posts in a users feed or timeline, in comments made by the user, user’s recommended for follow by the platform, and when users search for people. Usually only users’ username and display picture is displayed and the user can click on it and view the more detailed profile page.
The profile page displays much more detailed information including: name, bio, location, education, work experience, interests, hobbies, friends, followers, posts authored, comments and likes. By default this information is public and visible to all users within the app - some social media apps like Facebook and LinkedIn shares users profile even outside the app to anyone on the internet.
Though most users are fine with it and even encourage it for more visibility, privacy could be a concern for some users. We need to provide the tools necessary for users to control:
Who can see their posts (everyone, friends only, or a selected set of people)
Who can see their user profile and what information is shown.
Who can reply to their posts?
Who can message them directly?
Whether the users profile should be shown in search results or not.
Whether the users profile should be visible outside the application to people on the internet.
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