Social media security threats investigation and mitigation methods: A preliminary review

Abstract

Recent advancement of data collection and coupled statistics, big data became a significant issue in various research areas like: Machine learning, data mining, social networks, artificial intelligence, etc. Social networking is used as a platform for various applications like: government, business, educational, political, dating and matrimonial, etc. Like each and every platform, social networking too has its own set of pros and cons. We examine the types of posting on social media websites and influence of posting data and privacy concerns of Facebook and twitter users. This study indicates the different concerns of users regarding posting information and its influences of user voiced privacy concerns. It is beneficial in fields like: education, advertisements, online shopping but people get addicted to social networking, its time consuming in various issues and can be misused for cybercrimes. We've discussed the e-government objectives of using social media. Social networking is also vulnerable at different stages and attacked in several ways that includes evil twin attack, virus attack, phishing attack, account hijacking, data breach attack, fraud and scams. Site monitoring, developing security policies, educating users and training programs, updating software, archiving, media contents are several mitigation techniques are used to reduce the effects of cyber-attacks.