Security Risks in Social Media
Discuss About The Security Issues Associated With Social Media?
Social media is the easiest way of communication in the world in the modern world. Social media including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ have helped in maintaining the communication network all over the world. On the other hand, social media have become platform for criminal activities by cybercriminals.
This report deals with various security and privacy issues reacted with the social media. The use of the social media has been provided in the report. This report focuses on three recent research paper on the topic and analyses it. The daily use of the social media has been described in the report. This report deals with the various risks involved in the social media.
This report outlines the limitations of the use of the social media related ti the security and privacy issues. This report provides some solutions to the privacy issues of the social media. Different preventive measures are provided in the report for mitigating the challenges and issues related to the social media.
Social media networking has become a daily necessity for the people all over the world. Social media has grabbed the attraction of all users over the internet. It has proved to a good communication platform for people over internet (Gritzalis et al., 2014). People can communicate with many other people including family, friends and other individuals. They can also meet new individuals and make friends. Different social media websites including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have maximized the market of social media. The volume and accessibility of private information on the social media have attracted different malicious users over the internet. These malicious users have targeted many users over the internet using the social media. As commented by Gritzalis et al., (2014), various security risks in the social networking are spear phishing, spoofing and web application attacks. These attacks are successful due to trusting social environment.
Many people used to share their personal information over the social media that causes risk for the data loss. The hackers hacks their social media account and gathers all the personal information including contact number, address, financial information and confidential information of business. The potentiality of the attacks on the social media account and profile is generally intended to breach the personal information of the user and misuse it. Outside the association, person-to-person communication can enable a business to reach and draw in clients, enhance the client encounter, and deal with its image picture. Numerous organizations today watch locales, for example, Twitter and Facebook, to tune in on the gab about their items and administrations (Ventola, 2014). Their online image envoys can advance new items or, if a business’ notoriety is undermined, utilize web-based social networking to move the talk the correct way.
Privacy Issues in Social Media
There is a huge increase in the number of users of social media all over the world. According to Alexander, (2014), there were approx. 1 billion users in 2012, that is 19.2% more than that of 2011. The increase in the use of the internet among the users have increased the threats of security of data and information (Kandias et al., 2013). There are many cases in which users share posts about their personal life on the social media. These increases the risks of data loss form the social media. The sensational ascent in assaults in the most recent year disclose to us that informal communities and their a large number of clients need to do significantly more to shield themselves from composed cybercrime, or hazard neglecting to fraud plans, tricks, and malware assaults. Understanding these dangers and difficulties ought to be routed to stay away from potential loss of private and individual data. Long-range informal communication certainly should be incorporated into the data security approach and client training.
There are various privacy issues prevailing in the social media over the internet. Some of them are discussed below:
Security risks
With the increase in the use of internet and lack of awareness, the security risks if data and information is increasing. Various types of security risks including theft of identity, fraud, phishing and cyber bullying (Li & Qian, 2016). People that provide personal data on Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites are more prone to security risks rather than others. The data is stored over the internet that is not provided with quality security protocols.
Identity theft
The attackers used to attack with the help of applications for which ask permission from the users. If the user allow them, the application breaches into the profile of the users and hacks data and information (Flanagin et al., 2014). The hackers can misuse the breached data and information of the user.
Figure 1: Security threats in social media
(Source: Li & Qian, 2016)
Profiling Risk
The profiling risk refers to the profile cloning. In this case, the hackers uses the personal information of the users and make a clone profile of it. The clone profile can be used for retrieving the information of other friends of the users online. There is another way of profile cloning named as cross-site profile cloning (Elmaghraby & Losavio, 2014). In this case, the attacker hacks the personal information of the user from one social media website and creates another profile on another social website. This causes a huge risk of misinterpreting of the personal information and use them for any type of criminal activities.
Impact of Social Media
Fake product sale
The hacker used to provide a fake advertisement of any product with huge discount offers that attract the users and they click on it. The clicking on the advertisements transfers the profile information of the user to the attackers (Sikkens et al., 2017).
The impacts of the privacy issues of social media have a drastic impact on the society and real world. Most of the individuals are connected with the social media websites. They used to share their personal information in the social media platforms for making new friends and communicate with them (Khandpur et al., 2017). On the other hand, the hackers searches for loopholes in the account of user and penetrate into their profile. They used to follow some particular user and analyses the activity of the user over social media.
Social Impact
The individuals in the society are affected by the security issues in the social media. The personal information of individuals are breached and can be misused by the hackers that causes an imbalance in the society (Tagoe & Sharif, 2017). The reputation of an individual in the society might be hampered with the data breach.
Figure 2: Impact of social media
(Source: Tagoe & Sharif, 2017)
Mental Impact
The data breach in the social media can mentally affect any individual. The personal photos and memories of any individual can be hacked during the attacks on the social media websites. The social media platform has helped in maintaining the communication with different people in all over the world (Fuchs, 2017). Therefore, the attacks in these websites can affect any individual mentally.
The amount of attacks on the social media websites have increased in the modern world. With the enhancement of the technologies and ICT, the frequency of the attacks have also increased globally. However, few strategies might help in controlling the number of attacks on the social media websites.
Many individuals used to share their every personal information in the internet. These attracts the hackers towards the account and profile. Therefore, it is necessary to limit the amount of posts shared on the social media (Brivot et al., 2016). The users have to be concern with the photos and videos sharing in the social media platforms.
The internet is a platform that is public to the world. Anything that is posted over the internet is accessed by anyone in the world. Therefore, it is important to be concerned with the information shared over the internet (Di Gangi et al., 2016). Many annoying contents are posted on the social media that helps in breaching out data and information of the users.
Preventive Measures for Security Risks in Social Media
Different types of applications are posted on the social media that are fake and fraud. Many users tries to access those third-party applications and get trapped. The login credentials of the user are transferred to the hackers and data is breached (Wamba & Akter, 2016). Therefore, users have to be aware of these unnecessary applications posted on the social media platforms. These helps in minimizing the cyber-attack over the social media websites.
The account ad profile of the users have to be protected with strong passwords that provides high security to the account. The passwords must be at least eight characters long consisting of letters, numbers and special characters. This makes difficult for the hackers to crack the passwords. Combining capita and small letters can be a better option for creating strong passwords of the account and profile in social media websites (Zhang & Gupta, 2016). It is also necessary to change and update the passwords at regular period.
The multi-factor authentication uses more than one form of authentication including biometric, fingerprint scan, iris recognition and voice ID. These forms of credentials provides high security to the account of the user (Jabee & Alam, 2016).
The user must configure their privacy settings that allows access to personal information to those trusted people (Patel et al., 2017). The privacy settings in the account helps in limiting the number of people accessing the profile of the user.
From the above discussion on the security and privacy issues in the social media websites, I have understood that use of social media websites requires some special attention and awareness. I think that the use of the internet and social media websites have increased from previous years. This have increased the consequences of the using the social media. I understood that Facebook has been most used by the users. Facebook provides a platform of communicating with any people all over the world. Therefore, hackers have mostly targeted Facebook for breaching personal information of the users. I think people have to be educated about the smart use of these social websites. This help in safe use of the social websites and communicating with different people safely and securely. Social networking websites have been used for marketing process of various products. I think users have to be smart enough to understand the difference between real and fake product advertisements. Fake advertisements provide huge discount on big brands that not feasible in real. I think that the users have to use strong passwords that creates difficulties for the hackers to crack the passwords. I think information about the security and prevention measures applied over the social networking websites needs to be provided to the users all over the world. This might help in preventing them from using wrong way of using the social networking websites. Therefore, I think by smart thinking, users can be safe from any kind of cyber-attack on the social networking websites.
Conclusion
It can be concluded that the se of the social networking websites have been increased in the recent years. The security and privacy of the users in these social networking websites has been an important element in the cyber world. The cyber-attacks have been common in these recent years. Therefore, the users have to be safe from these attacks. This report highlights the security and privacy issues in the social media websites. There are various issues discussed in the report. The impact of these security and privacy issues in the real world has been focused in the report. The use of the prevention measures helps in preventing form the cyber bullying of the hackers in the social media websites. The use of the strong passwords and updating the privacy settings helps in minimizing the cyber-attacks over the social media websites.
References
Alexander, D. E. (2014). Social media in disaster risk reduction and crisis management. Science and Engineering Ethics, 20(3), 717-733.
Brivot, M., Brivot, M., Gendron, Y., Gendron, Y., Guénin, H., & Guénin, H. (2017). Reinventing organizational control: Meaning contest surrounding reputational risk controllability in the social media arena. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 30(4), 795-820.
Di Gangi, P. M., Johnston, A. C., Worrell, J. L., & Thompson, S. C. (2016). What could possibly go wrong? A multi-panel Delphi study of organizational social media risk. Information Systems Frontiers, 1-20.
Elmaghraby, A. S., & Losavio, M. M. (2014). Cyber security challenges in Smart Cities: Safety, security and privacy. Journal of advanced research, 5(4), 491-497.
Flanagin, A. J., Metzger, M. J., Pure, R., Markov, A., & Hartsell, E. (2014). Mitigating risk in ecommerce transactions: perceptions of information credibility and the role of user-generated ratings in product quality and purchase intention. Electronic Commerce Research, 14(1), 1-23.
Fuchs, C. (2017). Social media: A critical introduction. Sage.
Gritzalis, D., Kandias, M., Stavrou, V., & Mitrou, L. (2014). History of information: the case of privacy and security in social media. In Proc. of the History of Information Conference (pp. 283-310).
Gritzalis, D., Stavrou, V., Kandias, M., & Stergiopoulos, G. (2014, March). Insider threat: enhancing BPM through social media. In New Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS), 2014 6th International Conference on (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
Jabee, R., & Alam, M. A. (2016). Issues and Challenges of Cyber Security for Social Networking Sites (Facebook). International Journal of Computer Applications, 144(3).
Kandias, M., Galbogini, K., Mitrou, L., & Gritzalis, D. (2013, June). Insiders trapped in the mirror reveal themselves in social media. In International Conference on Network and System Security (pp. 220-235). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Khandpur, R. P., Ji, T., Ning, Y., Zhao, L., Lu, C. T., Smith, E. R., … & Ramakrishnan, N. (2017, February). Determining Relative Airport Threats from News and Social Media. In AAAI (pp. 4701-4707).
Li, L., & Qian, K. (2016, June). Using Real-Time Fear Appeals to Improve Social Media Security. In Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), 2016 IEEE 40th Annual (Vol. 2, pp. 610-611). IEEE.
Patel, R. B. R. M. P., & Joshi, M. H. (2017). Privacy and Security Issues in Social Online Networks.
Sikkens, E., van San, M., Sieckelinck, S., Boeije, H., & de Winter, M. (2017). Participant Recruitment through Social Media: Lessons Learned from a Qualitative Radicalization Study Using Facebook. Field Methods, 29(2), 130-139.
Tagoe, F. T., & Sharif, M. S. (2017, January). The Future of Enterprise Security with Regards to Mobile Technology and Applications. In International Conference on Global Security, Safety, and Sustainability (pp. 321-330). Springer, Cham.
Ventola, C. L. (2014). Social media and health care professionals: benefits, risks, and best practices. Pharmacy and Therapeutics, 39(7), 491.
Wamba, S. F., & Akter, S. (2016, September). Impact of perceived connectivity on intention to use social media: modelling the moderation effects of perceived risk and security. In Conference on e-Business, e-Services and e-Society (pp. 219-227). Springer International Publishing.
Zhang, Z., & Gupta, B. B. (2016). Social media security and trustworthiness: overview and new direction. Future Generation Computer Systems.
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