Social Network's Security Related to Healthcare
Fatna Elmendili, Habiba Chaoui, Younès El Bouzekri El Idrissi · 2019
Nowadays, the world is experiencing a huge technological revolution. Indeed, technological innovations, such as intelligent mobile phones and intelligent social networks, are emerging day after day and affecting our life. We use these “connected objects” on a daily basis, so we begin to talk about a connected world. The data resulting from this technological explosion over the last two decades exceed all the data that have been produced since the beginning of human civilization. The enormous volume of data is not the only concern. These data are so diverse and occur at very high frequencies as traditional database management systems. The entire world is affected by this revolution and data explosion, and the medical and health institutions are not an exception. Medical data are produced in significant volumes and rates, and the health sector has also undergone a technological upheaval. Indeed, the use of new communication technologies allows us to create a link between doctors and patients in a clear and direct way. On the other hand, the use of social networks in healthcare presents many challenges, including security and the protection of patient's privacy. Since medical data are very sensitive and contain personal information, a loss or divulgation can seriously damage both the private and professional lives of doctors and patients in addition to the organization's reputation. Moreover, the nature of the health sector, which involves several stakeholders in the business process, increases the risk related to patient safety and privacy, such as disclosure of data to other parties that do not necessarily have the same idea about the importance of medical data security. Many healthcare managers are working effectively to use social media to engage patients and consumers. Through effective marketing and communication tactics, organizations can veer away from traditional advertising techniques and use the Internet to connect with consumers in the healthcare field. Consumers rely heavily on information found online and use the Internet to gather information about healthcare and connect with other patients to get support and know the same conditions. Others use these resources for research or to share experiences with healthcare providers and other related organizations. Patients also seek information through social media that select physicians, specialists, and hospitals to make informed decisions about the best practices for seeking care. Individuals will use social media to publish reviews or other comments that support others from choosing this type of healthcare in the future. It is essential that providers be active on social networks and provide the appropriate accurate information for seekers. To use these communication platforms in healthcare, we must ensure the safety and privacy of patients and doctors who use social networks as a means of communication and data sharing. In order to compensate the inadequacies of protection technics already existing in social networks, a new security approach based on “honeypots” can be adopted to preserve the privacy of profiles linked to healthcare. This approach can detect malicious profiles and malicious content shared between illegitimate users and legitimate users in social networks and directly influence the data shared between the doctor and the patient. IT security experts are studying these threats to implement new solutions. Among the strategies used are honeypots, which are tools adapted to observe attacker's behavior. Honeypot is a technique widely used in network security and detection of malicious profiles in social networks. A honeypot is a computer system that is deliberately vulnerable to one or more vulnerabilities and is designed to attract attackers in order to study their behavior. There are several categories, low or high interaction, depending on the level of interaction proposed to hackers. They allow the collection of data from real processes, which are essential to establish realistic assumptions about the attacker's behavior. Recently, honeypots are also used to fight malicious behavior on the most popular social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. This type of honeypots is called “social honeypots.” To preserve the value of the community and ensure long-term success, the proposed approach is based on the use of social honeypots to discover malicious profiles in social networks. The main ideas of the approach are as follows: - The deployment of social honeypots to collect information about malicious profiles. - Analyzing the characteristics of these malicious profiles and honeypots deployed to create classifiers that filter existing profiles and control new profiles. Inspired by security researchers who have used honeypots to observe and analyze malicious activities in networks, this method uses social honeypots to trap users so that the profiles that are detected by honeypots have a high probability of being a malicious profile. Using the proposed approach, we can monitor the activity of malicious profiles using social honeypots. Social honeypots are defined as systems that monitor the behavior of attackers and provide access to their information (for example, their profiles). This chapter will introduce the concept of social networking security in relation to healthcare and then outline a security approach to detect malicious profiles that share malicious content in order to steal personal information from patients and doctors.