Developing a software tool for constructing a social graph of a social network user in the task of analyzing its security from multi-pass social engineering attacks

The study is based on the problem of lacking visualization tools showing the intensity of interaction between users of the VK online social network, namely the display of metrics that allow evaluating and ranking the intensity of interaction both between a user and his friends, and between friends with each other. The aim of this paper is to improve the accessibility and timeliness of users' interaction intensity analysis by automating social graph visualization. It is assumed that the numerical coefficients of the social graph arcs will be compared with an assessment of user interaction intensity based on data extracted from publicly available sources of the VK social network. To achieve this goal, the authors considered the following issues: optimization of aggregating necessary data on observed interaction of friends in the VK social network, software implementation of functions for building a social graph, visualization of users' interaction intensity with the possibility of choosing metrics of interest, creation of convenient interface and embedding the developed toolkit into a web-application. The subject of the research is the data of interaction between VK users and the ways of their visualization. The research methods are based on optimizing sending queries to VK API, as well as developing functions and settings to build a social graph. The theoretical significance of the proposed solution is in the development of approaches to analyze the proliferation of multistep social engineering attacks and to validate models for estimating user interaction in-tensity. The result has significant practical relevance consisting in automating the process of assessing the intensity of employee interaction, thereby laying the foundation for taking effective measures to mitigate the risks of successful social engineering attacks. The novelty of the research is in the proposed improvement of visualization of VK users' social graph construction by adding new metrics to assess the intensity of users' interaction.