Abstract:

Social networking sites is the interaction of people by means of virtual platform and its applications in order to meet with people of common interest with the purpose of doing business, promoting ideas, disseminating information, maintain interpersonal relationships and academic activities. Students use social networking sites for entertainment, finding and chatting with friends, sharing photos and videos, post happenings and events in real-time using social networking sites like Facebook, WhatsApp, Google etc. Millions of students connect to social networking site every day. This attracts the interest of the educators and researchers to implement social networking sites as a virtual learning environment. Teachers use social networking sites to organize lectures, arrange group discussion, share lecture notes, conduct assignments, conduct examinations and tests and disseminate relevant information to students. On the other hand, criminal elements in the society trick the students by using the information available on the social networking sites to commit crime against the students. The purpose of this research is to investigate the types of crimes that are committed to students on social networking sites. Also, the researchers investigate the ways and techniques used by these criminals to commit crime against the students. At the same time, the research also investigates the various ways and techniques the students can use to detect, prevent and also to mitigate the impact of such crimes against them. Literature review method was used as a research method in the study. The popular valuable quality journals in scientific areas were analyzed. Literature review results showed that mostly kidnapping, sexual harassment, bullying, credit card fraud and threatening crimes that are committed to students on social networking sites can be avoided. The various ways and techniques used by the criminal to commit crimes against the students such as identity theft, phishing, spam etc. were also identified. Similarly, the various techniques like parental controls used in Facebook, TheOneSpy monitoring app used in Whatsapp that are used to protect the students were discussed. At the same time, computer forensic data analysis techniques used to detect crime against the students such as File Viewers, File and Data Analysis, Internet Analysis, Database forensics, Mobile devices analysis and Network forensics etc have been discussed. Computer forensic tools like Encase, FTK Forensic Toolkit, SANS SIFT, PTK Forensic, Bulk extractor, The Sleuth Toolkit, The Coroner’s Toolkit, COFEE were analyzed. The researchers hope that this paper would be a guideline to students, parents and teachers in protecting the students against the menace of social networking sites.

Keywords:

Social networking sites, cybercrime, crime detection, crime prevention, computer forensic.