Forensic Report: Social Media Crimes and Mitigation Strategies

This report provides a comprehensive overview of social media forensics, examining the impact of social media on communication and business while also highlighting the associated risks and crimes. It delves into various types of cybercrimes, including identity theft, phishing, and the use of social media for stalking and harassment. The report analyzes the vulnerabilities that arise from the sharing of personal information on social platforms and discusses the potential for misuse of this data. It also provides practical strategies for users to protect themselves, such as creating strong passwords, managing personal information, and being cautious about online interactions. The report concludes by emphasizing the importance of user education and awareness in mitigating the risks associated with social media usage, ultimately aiming to promote safer online practices and responsible digital citizenship.

Running Head: FORENSIC REPORT
Forensic report
[Document subtitle]

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Table of Contents
Forensic report.................................................................................................................................0
Executive Summary.........................................................................................................................2
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Benefits Of Social Media.................................................................................................................3
Analyzing Various Crimes Involved In Usage of Social Media....................................................4
How to overcome hurdles?..............................................................................................................7
Findings And Conclusions...............................................................................................................8
References......................................................................................................................................10
Glossary.........................................................................................................................................11

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Executive Summary
In this paper, I am presenting a report on crimes involved in social media forensics. (Forstall, et
al., 2016) Let us first discuss how social media has changed everything.
Technology is changing at a faster rate, and it has completely revolutionized the economy. Today
people make use of digital media to access, communicate and share information by sitting from
the comfort of their homes. But even social media has its cons such as their privacy issue,
stalking, threatening issues, etc. We will discuss the types of crimes involved and how to
combat them in this paper.
Introduction
Social media has become an essential part of communication in today's society and has changed
the way how the world does business, gets access to news and shares news, and communicate
with friends and family. Social media such as Fb includes photographs, status updates of people;
it tells the location of individuals at a particular point in time, video call and many other features.
Most people use social media everyday . 90percent of today's online adults use social media
regularly, and social networking continues to be one of the top online activity.”
Social media use in the United States alone has increased by three hundred fifty-six percent since
2006.Currently, There is 52 percent of Americans having at least one social media profile. More
than one billion people are active on Facebook each month, and Twitter has over 150 million
active users posting around 325 million Tweets a day.

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Every minute, social media users create massive amounts of data: According to particular
research Facebook users share 684,478 pieces of content; Tumblr blog owners publish 27,778
new posts; YouTube users upload 48 hours of new video; Foursquare users perform 2,083 check-
ins; Flickr users add 3,125 new photos, and Instagram users share 3,600 new photos. Apart from
that, there are hundreds of other social networking websites, each belonging to a different
country.
Benefits Of Social Media
The various benefits (Jussila, et al., 2014) of social media are as follows:-
 It helps in increasing brand recognition. It helps in getting new customers and retaining
existing customers. For example, a frequent Twitter user could hear about the company
for the first time after seeing in a newsfeed. Or, an otherwise not so dear customer might
get to know your brand better after seeing your presence on multiple social media
platforms.
 Social media helps in improving the brand loyalty of the firm.
 It can help in generating more opportunities for the business.
 It will lead to higher conversion rates.
 It will result in higher brand authority as interacting with your customers regularly is a
show of good faith. The more people will talk about it on social media; the more valuable
and authoritative your brand will seem to new users.
 It will lead to increased outbound traffic, and more traffic will result in more conversions
in the future.
 It will lead to decreased marketing costs.

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 It will help in getter better rank in search engines which shows how your website is
relevant.
 Every customer interaction on social media is an opportunity to showcase your customer
service level and enrich your relationship with its clients. For example, if a customer
complains about your product on Twitter, you can apologize publicly, and take
appropriate action to get it right. Or, if in case customer compliments us, we can thank
them and can recommend additional products to them. Thus it helps in making a great
experience with your client base.
 The feedbacks and suggestions provided by the customers provide useful insights.
Analyzing Various Crimes Involved In Usage of Social Media
Recent research reveals that identity theft affects millions of people a year, costing victims their
time and money in repair and recovery of the same. The problem is to identify what leads to this
pattern of online theft and fraud? It can be because of a combination of factors such as a lack of
consumer knowledge regarding how to protect your identity online; growing comfort and trust
in, social platform providers and the need for social platforms to generate revenue; and a lack of
appropriate policies of these standards. Although this issue is not yet in the mainstream
consciousness, it likely will be sooner rather than later.
Social media sites generate profit with targeted advertising, based on personal information. As
such, they encourage registered users to give more and more of their personal data as possible.
With not much government seeing them, industry standards or incentives to educate users on
security, privacy and identity protection, users are exposed to identity theft and fraud.

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Additionally, these platforms have a lot of confidential user information and are likely vulnerable
to an outside (or inside) attack.
With the increased use of social media, there are more opportunities than ever before to steal
identities or do fraud online. For example, status updates posted on Twitter, Facebook and many
other social media sites can be used by criminals. If you post that you’re out of town on vacation,
it can lead to burglary situation.If you mention that you’re away on business for a weekend, you
are yourself putting your family in danger of assault or robbery. When it comes to stalking or
stealing an identity, use of photo- and video-sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube provide
deeper insights into you, your family and friends, your house, favorite hobbies and interests
which are sometimes used on pornographic sites to blackmail the parents and thus to get ransom
money from them.
That being said, social networking sites have the greatest potential for abuse. While everyone
knows they should never share their social security number and driver's license, many social
networking sites ask for, if not require similar sensitive information that can be used against you
in a variety of wicked ways. The following profile elements can be used to steal or
misappropriate your identity:
 Full name
 Date of birth
 Hometown
 Relationship status
 School locations and graduation dates
 Pet names

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 Other affiliations, interests, and hobbies
One will probably ask why sharing your pet’s name, high school graduation date and
membership to an organization with the public is a potentially dangerous move. There are a
variety of reasons why one should keep personal information confidential, or at least carefully
managed. Below are just a few examples of how this information can be used to compromise
your identity(Patton, et al., 2014)
 Phishing is the fraudulent practice of sending emails from well-known companies to
induce individuals to give their personal information such as login essentials, password
and credit card details. It leads to obtaining of sensitive information of users through
online conversations.
A USA company was recently attacked with false Better Business Bureau complaints to
get additional information about the business and its employees.
 GPS-enabled phones which share your location can reveal sensitive information like your
home address, work address and the places you visit.
 Ninety-six percent of Facebook profiles have at least one application, many of which are
not reviewed and can be used for malicious and criminal purposes.
 Sure False profiles can lead to resuming fraud or defamation of character. A Canadian
reporter recently was defamed via a fake profile that included misleading posts, poorly
considered group memberships and changeable political positions.

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 An American soldier abroad in Iraq discovered his bank account was repeatedly being
accessed online. A security expert was able to reproduce access with nothing more than
his name, e-mail and Facebook profile.
 Trojan horse is a malicious computer program which is used to hack the computer of the
user by misleading him into believing that it's a right content. For, e.g., a user could be
duped into executing an e-mail attachment which looks like real though it is fake, (e.g., a
conventional form to be filled in), or download of a particular drive or from spam links
and fake pop-up & Advertisement. It could lead to crashing of a computer, deletion of
files, corruption of data and getting access to sensitive information.
How to overcome hurdles?
Now before everyone move on to certain conclusions such as closing all social media accounts, it
is important for users to know that instead of cancellation of all your accounts one should be
smart enough what information to be shared and with whom to share online. Hence one must
follow certain smart practices (Malleson, et al., 2015) to ensure that they keep on making use of
the benefits of social media without getting caught by any virus or any other cyber attacks.
 One must never assign or give out their social security number or driver's license
numbers even to trusted branded companies without proper research or doing the proper
inspection. They must know the reason beforehand for the party wanting to get sensitive
information, and they must be given in writing in extreme case that their information will
not be misused.
 Consider distinct usernames and passwords for each profile which even the hacker could
not identify quickly.

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 Change your passwords every week.
 Don’t give out your username and password to third parties even if it helps you in
expanding your network.
 If you are planning to be active on social media, minimize the use of personal
information on your profiles that may be used for password verification or phishing
attacks.
 Avoid listing the following information publicly: date of birth, hometown, home address,
year of high school or college graduation, primary e-mail address.
 One must only include people to your network that you know or have met, as opposed to
friends of friends and strangers.
 For password security verification questions, use a password for all answers (rather than
the reply to the specific question, like “What is your father’s maiden name?”).
 When changing the age to protect your real birthday, keep the date close; otherwise, you
may get yourself exposed to age discrimination.
 Do not talk trash or post any unwanted thing about the politician for example or any
famous person as it can land you in trouble.
 Google yourself regularly and monitor your credit using the free annual report or monthly
monitoring services.
 Make use of encrypted data to prevent unauthorized access.
Findings And Conclusions
By my research, we can say that social media has both pros and cons. On the one hand, it helps
everyone sitting from the comfort of their homes to share, get access and communicate with

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friends and family members. It has made life a hell lot easier as one can follow their well-loved
celebrities, can give their valuable suggestions and feedback.
But similarly, on the other hand, excessive use of social media can lead to phishing, Trojan horse
virus issues, privacy issues, stalking and threatening problems, etc.
Hence it is advisable that users should not disclose any sensitive information, pictures, videos,
etc. on social media. They need to be properly educated about the same and raise awareness
about it so that no one falls prey to cyber crimes.

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References
Forstall, C. W., Cavalcante, T., Theophilo, A., Shen, B., Carvalho, A. R., & Stamatatos, E.
(2016). Authorship Attribution for Social Media Forensics.
Jussila, J. J., Kärkkäinen, H., & Aramo-Immonen, H. (2014). Social media utilization in
business-to-business relationships of technology industry firms. Computers in Human Behavior,
30, 606-613.
Patton, D. U., Hong, J. S., Ranney, M., Patel, S., Kelley, C., Eschmann, R., & Washington, T.
(2014). Social media as a vector for youth violence: A review of the literature. Computers in
Human Behavior, 35, 548-553.
Malleson, N., & Andresen, M. A. (2015). The impact of using social media data in crime rate
calculations: shifting hot spots and changing spatial patterns. Cartography and Geographic
Information Science, 42(2), 112-121.
Trottier, D., & Fuchs, C. (2014). Social media, politics and the state: protests, revolutions, riots,
crime and policing in the age of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (Vol. 16). Routledge.
Crawford, T. A. M., & Evans, K. (2016). Crime prevention and community safety.
Taylor, R. W., Fritsch, E. J., & Liederbach, J. (2014). Digital crime and digital terrorism.
Prentice Hall Press.
Patton, D. U., Hong, J. S., Ranney, M., Patel, S., Kelley, C., Eschmann, R., & Washington, T.
(2014). Social media as a vector for youth violence: A review of the literature. Computers in
Human Behavior, 35, 548-553.

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Glossary
 Encryption: It means making use of individual codes which will help in preventing
unauthorized access to such data by any other party then we are sending the data to.
 Phishing: It is the fraudulent practice of sending emails from well-known companies to
induce individuals to give their personal information such as login essentials, password
and credit card details. It leads to obtaining of sensitive information of users through
online conversations.
 Trojan horse is a malicious computer program which is used to hack the computer of the
user by misleading him into believing that it's a right content. For, e.g., a user could be
duped into executing an e-mail attachment which looks like real though it is fake, (e.g., a
regular form to be filled in), or download of a particular drive or from spam links and
fake pop-up & Advertisement. It could lead to crashing of the computer, deletion of files,
corruption of data and getting access to sensitive information.