Security Risks for Social Media Implementation

SECURITY RISKS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA IMPLEMENTATION
 Abstract— The report discusses about the most common and
important threats that affect during the implementation of
social media platforms. With the rise of technologies, attackers
have gained sensitive tools in order to pose attacks to users.
Various companies and business organizations who try to
implement social media strategies should be aware of the severe
risk implications towards their business or involved customers.
This report thus puts focus over the implementation risks that
might attack over business during the implementation
procedure of social media.
I. INTRODUCTION
Social media defines a process that could be linked with
business processes to bring about the activeness of the
business and increase the reach of business to the customers.
In the recent times, business have the capability to set up
their business platform over the social media platform. This
would provide massive amount of help to reach to customers
and define the solutions, products and services offered by
them (McGuire, 2015). With the engaging kind of impacts
based on social media platforms, it would also allow
customers to engage with businesses and access their
services.
Although social media has a broad base for business to set
up their customer base, it would also lead to vulnerability to
a wide set of attacks. As the different companies would make
use of the social media to promote their business and spread
brand awareness to a broad set of customers, this would also
lead to severe risks towards the business. There are a wide set
of challenges and risks during the process of implementation
of social media strategies for the business (Khan, Swar &
Lee, 2014). The following sections within the report focuses
over the security risks that might pose a severe threat to the
business and would also recommend approaches towards
their resolution.
II.DISCUSSION
A. Definition of the Problem
With the rising form of popularity of the different social
media platforms, it has created the best place for marketing
the business aspects and also connect with a huge number of
customers on a daily basis. However, due to the widespread
popularity and extended networks established by using social
media platforms, it has further led to incurring of several
risks during the time of implementation within any business.
From the discussion supported by the authors, it can
be discussed that different kind of unsuspicious activities
occur within the platform of internet and the interconnected
network. Most of the activities within the business
organizations remain exposed and oblivious (Soomro, Shah
& Ahmed, 2016). Poor form of security practices that are
followed within the internet platform and within the

implementation of social media strategies, put the risk
towards business organizations. From the perspective of a
business, the risks towards the implementation of social
media can be defined as two-fold.
On a first kind, the social media accounts that are
meant for each individual company should be protected from
cyber-attacks and hacker groups.
Secondly, the businesses should also be highly concerned
of the ways in which employees would make use of social
media at various levels of the organization. These include the
areas of work or at home. The interconnected form of social
media could create an open platform based for the attackers
to hack the personal accounts (Gritzalis et al., 2014). These
hackers primarily target those kind of business accounts,
which have a direct access to the higher business profiles and
from where they could extract a large amount of data.
B. Security Risks during Social Media Implementation
During the process of implementation of social
media platforms, there might be severe kind of risks that
could affect the businesses. Some of the most important
problems arising during the implementation process are
described as under:
1. Unattended interaction within social media
accounts – It can be described as a good idea to reserve the
handle of the business brand even the social media account is
not being used on a regular basis (Deaton, 2015). This kind
of consistency that would be present across networks could
help in making the process to be easy to be recognized by
people.
2. Placement of baits within social media
networks – There are different kind of variations made by
Social Engine Optimization (SEO) that are used by
companies. In the recent times, the poisoning of SEO image
have also been posed again. Most of the social media
networks would allow visitors to see the top trending topics
that would be posted by the company (Fisher, 2015). Thus,
this would easily help the attackers to gain information about
the innovation strategies if planned by the company.
3. Rise of Scammers – There are many organization
who implement social media strategies to target a particular
base of customers to increase the proportion of the business.
Hence, they might also offer free registration within their
website in which users are required to lend their account
name and password. This helps business to acquire new
followers and calculate the number of registration on a per
day basis (Cresci et al., 2017). These are generally
considered as violation of terms and conditions set by social
media strategies, which most companies acquire to promote
their business. However, during implementing this approach,
the hackers might breach into the privacy settings and gain
access to customer data.
Another technique that is acquired by companies is
that they offer customers to send hundreds of friend requests
to a large set of random people and thus expect that their
requests would be accepted (McNaught, 2015). Companies
Security Risks for Social Media ImplementationName of the Student

SECURITY RISKS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA IMPLEMENTATION
even charge users during providing such kind of services.
This is described in the following diagram:
(Figure 1: Charging users for social media services)
(Source: McGuire, 2015)
4. Impersonation of Business or Personal
Accounts – Social media platforms do not offer real
authentication processes that would link the real business
owners with the virtual accounts. There are certain situations
when the fake accounts would be able to promote their pages
and request users to subscribe under their page (Wilcox,
Bhattacharya & Islam, 2014). These kind of accounts are
mostly created by groups trying to extract information from
followers in a wrong process. This might be considered as
another form of risk posed towards business during the
implementation of social media strategies. They would firstly
have to verify their social media account and then reach to
customers.
5. Impact of Koobface – The W32.Koobface worm
is considered as one of the largest malware attacks. This
malware attack is mainly posed over social media platforms
(Guo, Cheng & Kelley, 2016). It makes use of attacks based
on using social engineering strategies and thus depends on
link-opening behaviours that are used by users.
The current variants of attacks would send messages
to users and different other networks. The new variants that
are used by Koobface not only spread through Facebook but
also on another kind of social networks (Ikhalia & Arreymbi,
2014). Once these would be installed within the system of the
users, the Trojan would be able to automatically download
further components and start a search query that would be
accessing the credentials of other accounts of customers.
6. Phishing – Social media networks and accounts
request users to enter their user name and register themselves
with passwords. Thus, these pose huge risk for phishing
attacks. It was previously found in the banking websites that
a user would be requested to click on a certain link that
would redirect them to a certain page where they would be
asked to enter their credentials (Alam & El-Khatib, 2016). It
might be without a prior notice to the company and posed by
attackers to gain information from verified users of the
company.
Spoofed form of emails that could come from social
network service could ask user to link their credential within
the online form. This could appear to the user that it is a
trusted source. However, as soon as a user would provide
their credentials to the system, it would soon recognise each
of the linked accounts of the user with other organizations or
banking services (Silic & Back, 2016). Thus, this could be
considered as a serious form of threat whenever a company
would try to implement such kind of use of social media
strategies for their business.
7. Password Resetting – Many web services offer
the approach to users for resetting their passwords whenever
they would forget them. This is further followed by
answering to a certain number of questions that the user
would have chosen during the time of registration, which is
considered as a general process of verifying the authenticity
of a user (Franchi, Poggi & Tomaiuolo, 2015). However,
with the proliferation of attacks over social media, it can be
discussed that it would be considered as a very easy process
to extract the information that had been previously recorded
by the users. This also helps the attacker to assume a
particular security question and reset the account settings of
the user. After the compromising over the account, it further
helps the attacker to gain other useful information and also
spam towards the connected users.
Hence, this could also be considered as one of the vital
risks that apply to businesses or companies during
implementing social media applications within their business
to proliferate their reach towards other new customers.
C.Widgets and Applications used in Social Networks
There are some social media networks that allow the
providing of active content to become embedded in the form
of widgets and applications. These applications are mainly
intended to interact with users. Each of the social media
platforms offer their own ways based on the implementation
of applications or other kind of active content. Large kind of
social media platforms have their own methods of creating
their personal APIs that further help developers to gain
access to information from the accounts of users.
Some of the examples of widgets and applications
that are used by social media platforms are:
1. Never Text Again
(Figure 2: Example of Never Text Again)
(Source: McGuire, 2015)
Based on the analysis of the click statistics, it could
be found that 300,000 clicks were registered. These are
generally considered as rogue applications that are mostly
created by attackers in order to attract a user to avail their
services. Such kind of applications are mostly growing in
huge numbers (Rauschnabel, Kammerlander & Ivens, 2016).
Facebook and other social media platforms ban such kind of
applications and links but attackers register with some other
name in order to keep the attack in working condition.

SECURITY RISKS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA IMPLEMENTATION
2. Fake Security Check Notifications
(Figure 3: Images of Fake Notifications)
(Source: McGuire, 2015)
This kind of notification might occur during the
implementation of social media platforms within the
business. Users would be asked to complete a survey while
the intention of the malware attacker would be gain vital
information from the user (Kayes & Iamnitchi, 2017). Thus,
users would misinterpret or unknowingly fill up the survey
form while leading their information into the hands of the
attacker.
3. Quiz – Text quizzes are a common factor occurring
over social media. Attackers might create a set of questions
in the disguise of a game application. Users are often asked
to play such games where they have to fill answers to
provided questions. In the process, the application asks the
user to enter their credentials before assessing the quiz. After
the user completes the quiz, it also provides a link that the
user could share it with friends for presenting their results. In
this manner, the malicious applications passes on to a large
number of users and creates a network.
III. CONCLUSION
From the above discussion, it has been concluded that
social media although provides useful meaning to the
backbone of the company and provides a wide-ranging
benefits, but it also poses serious issues of theft of private
data. This report covers the major aspect of understanding the
type of social media security risks that mostly occur during
the implementation process. Forming strategies towards the
development of a social media platform for any business or
company should be taken with a serious approach.
The company should implement the best kind of encryption
standards and other latest secure coding platforms that would
help in reducing the risk of breach in customer data. Most of
the companies hold a high reputation in the global market.
They also possess a large number of customer data. Hence,
they should be extremely careful during the implementation
of social media as with the incurring of social media
networks, they would be vulnerable to a wide range of
attacks that have been listed in the above report. Thus, a
proper form of analysis and proper risk mitigation strategies
should be at the core of the implementation process such as
to reduce the vital threats.
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