Memes and social engineering attacks in virtual space

The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we will provide model for the meme transmission from its bearer to a member of his virtual friends set and meme spreading in social networks in the context of socio-humanitarian views on the nature of the internet memes. On the other hand, we will highlight issues of generation, circulation and assess the potential impact of memes and provide the presentation of case illustrations to outline the possibility of further development of the socio-engineering and other formal models of memes with the currently known results and the needs of field and analytical studies of social networks in sociology, political science, psychology, information technology and other related studies.