Social Networking Security during COVID-19: A Systematic Literature Review

During the Covid-19 Pandemic, the usage of social media networks increased exponentially. People engage in education, business, shopping, and other social activities (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube). As social networking expands rapidly, its positive and negative impacts affect human health. All this leads to social crimes and illegal activities like phishing, hacking, ransomware, password attacks, spyware, blackmailing, Middle-man-attack. This research extensively discusses the social networking threats, challenges, online surveys, and future effects. We conduct an online survey using the google forms platform to collect the responses of social networking sites (SNS) users within Pakistan to show how SNS affects health positively and negatively. According to the collected response, we analyzed that 50% of the users use SNS for education purposes, 17.5% use it for shopping purposes, 58.2% use it for entertainment, 37.1% use it for communication, and 9.8% use it for other purposes. According to the response, the excessive use of SNS affects the health that 9.8% users face the physical threat, 42.8% user faces mental health issues due to excessive or inappropriate use of SN, and 50.5% users feel moral threat using Social sites. Finally, we conclude our paper by discussing the open challenges, conclusions, and future directions.

Classification and categorization of COVID-19 outbreak in Pakistan

Coronavirus is a potentially fatal disease that normally occurs in mammals and birds. Generally, in humans, the virus spreads through aerial droplets of any type of fluid secreted from the body of an infected person. Coronavirus is a family of viruses that is more lethal than other unpremeditated viruses. In December 2019, a new variant, i.e., a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) developed in Wuhan province, China. Since January 23, 2020, the number of infected individuals has increased rapidly, affecting the health and economies of many countries, including Pakistan. The objective of this research is to provide a system to classify and categorize the COVID-19 outbreak in Pakistan based on the data collected every day from different regions of Pakistan. This research also compares the performance of machine learning classifiers (i.e., Decision Tree (DT), Naive Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machine, and Logistic Regression) on the COVID-19 dataset collected in Pakistan. According to the experimental results, DT and NB classifiers outperformed the other classifiers. In addition, the classified data is categorized by implementing a Bayesian Regularization Artificial Neural Network (BRANN) classifier. The results demonstrate that the BRANN classifier outperforms state-of-the-art classifiers. © 2021 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.

A Novel Ensemble Machine Learning Method to Detect Phishing Attack

Currently and particularly with remote working scenarios during COVID-19, phishing attack has become one of the most significant threats faced by internet users, organizations, and service providers. In a phishing attack, the attacker tries to steal client sensitive data (such as login, passwords, and credit card details) using spoofed emails and fake websites. Cybercriminals, hacktivists, and nation-state spy agencies have now got a fertilized ground to deploy their latest innovative phishing attacks. Timely detection of phishing attacks has become most crucial than ever. Machine learning algorithms can be used to accurately detect phishing attacks before a user is harmed. This paper presents a novel ensemble model to detect phishing attacks on the website. We select three machine learning classifiers: Artificial Neural Network (ANN), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Decision Tree (C4.5) to use in an ensemble method with Random Forest Classifier (RFC). This ensemble method effectively detects website phishing attacks with better accuracy than existing studies. Experimental results demonstrate that the ensemble of KNN and RFC detects phishing attacks with 97.33% accuracy. © 2020 IEEE.