This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: On the surface, posting online reviews looks like a win-win activity. It helps both businesses we like and people who might frequent them.
But although posting reviews can benefit others, it can also put us all at risk, according to new research from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. It can inadvertently expose our personal connections and make us and our online friends more vulnerable to cyberattacks. The research focuses on a particular kind of email attack called spear phishing.
A bad actor impersonates someone the target user trusts. The actor tries to trick the target into sending money or disclosing confidential information, such as passwords or bank accounts. In recent years, phishing has become big business, says Yan Leng, assistant professor of information, risk and operations management at McCombs.
From 2021–2023, she reports, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received nearly 1 million complaints involving $305 million in losses. "Social influence is a good thing," Leng says. "The problem is that network data could be leaked." By network data, Leng means information about our social relationships with people we're connected to online.
They can be on social platforms such as Facebook and review platforms such as Amazon, Google or Airbnb. Unlike Facebook, most review platforms don't list a person's friends. But Leng suspected that a phisher could figure out someone's friends from their online behavior, such as reviews they wrote and ratings they provided.
She investigated with Yijun Chen of the University of Melbourne; Xiaowen Dong of the University of Oxford; Junfeng Wu of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen; and Guodong Shi of the University of Sydney. The researchers used the business review platform Yelp and covered 4,299 reviewers from Louisiana and Pennsylvania in 2020. On Yelp, unlike many review platforms, both review texts and lists of friends were publicly accessible.
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