The growing threat of safety while using online programs, especially social media, isn't stopping anytime soon. That's why three University of North Georgia - Dahlonega students, along with a UNG professor, are researching how much data is stored on computers and web browsers by social media users.
UNG President Bonita Jacobs awarded the Presidential Semester Incentive Award to computer science professor Dr. Ahmad Ghafarian in January, and since then, he and the three students have been conducting controlled experiments.
The senior students, Justin Frady of Buford, Darius Fiallo of Miami, Florida, and Deniz Keskin from Istanbul have created multiple social media accounts, engage on the platforms and monitor the activity using open source computer forensic tools, the same ones law enforcement agencies use.
"I feel this research is important because social media is here to stay. Some social media applications may die out, but there are always new ones to take their place," Frady said. "Therefore, a lot of people will always trust their private information to these sorts of applications, without knowing if their data is truly secure or not."
Ghafarian's goal for his student researchers is to see how easy it is to extract personal data once a social media user has logged into an account on a certain machine.
"The more we know, the more scary it is," Keskin said.
Fiallo, a computer science major, said the research can be nerve-wracking sometimes.
"This research looks for any security flaws in the major social media people use and finds a way to help people keep their accounts and information secure," Fiallo said.
As the experiments continue, the team will look at content of main memory, registry, file system, and so-called "private" internet browsers that are supposed to delete temporary internet files, or "cookies" for evidence of social media usage.
The group is using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in their research.
Friday
April 19th, 2024
4:48PM
