Phishing Threats in Social Media: Risks for Young Users

The study analyzes the prevalence of phishing in social media networks, emphasizing the susceptibility of young users. Despite understanding the risks, many fail to implement protective measures, exposing themselves to potential threats. The research underscores the importance of education on digital security practices to safeguard personal information and maintain online safety.

Running Head: SAFETY OF GENERAL PUBLIC ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Safety of General Public on Social Media
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1SAFETY OF GENERAL PUBLIC ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Executive Summary
This research is mainly aimed to ensure the safety and the security of the general public on the
social media. The social media has both good and bad impacts on people. The good impacts are
always welcome but the bad impacts have to be minimized. Thus, in this research, the problems
that can happen from the extensive uses of social media will be identified and their remedies will
be discussed. This is a primary study from data collected with the help of a questionnaire and the
analysis will be performed using appropriate statistical techniques.

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Table of Contents
1.0 Introduction................................................................................................................................3
2.0 Literature Review......................................................................................................................3
2.1 Relationships and Friendships...............................................................................................4
2.2 Reduction of Communication Barriers..................................................................................4
2.3 Business Opportunities..........................................................................................................4
2.4 Addiction...............................................................................................................................4
2.5 Isolation.................................................................................................................................5
2.6 Effect in Business Productivity.............................................................................................5
2.7 Safety of General Public........................................................................................................5
2.8 Phishing.................................................................................................................................5
3.0 Research Methodology..............................................................................................................6
4.0 Data Analysis.............................................................................................................................6
5.0 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................12
References......................................................................................................................................13
Appendices....................................................................................................................................14

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1.0 Introduction
Any website allowing any kind of social interactions is known as a social media. Today,
an extremely rapid growth of the social media is taking place throughout the whole world. There
are various websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace etc. that help people to keep
in touch with friends and family. The number of members of these social networking sites is
growing rapidly each day. Both the adults and the teenagers are joining these websites. There has
been a change in the world in many ways with the introduction of the social media. Each and
every individual of the world have been affected with its introduction in a separate manner. In
today’s world social media is helpful to people in a lot of ways. On the other hand, every good
practice has a negative influence and so does social media. There are a lot of positive effects
associated with the negativities and these positive effects have made the world a better and
stronger place to live in.
This research is aimed to ensure the safety of general public on the social media. The
factors that can be effective towards putting the general public in problems will be discussed in
the upcoming sections.
2.0 Literature Review
There are always a positive and a negative side of everything. The side a person chooses
depends on the perspective of the person and how the person is going to perceive the matter. The
same theory is applicable for the social media. To some people this is a revolutionary invention
and they admire the invention so much, but to some other people, only the negative impact of the
invention on the society is visible (Duggan and Smith 2015).

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2.1 Relationships and Friendships
The social networks have really found a way to connect to long lost friends and relatives
with whom there is no contact for some reasons or the other. With the help of the social media, it
has become very easy to look for old pals and talk to them, know about their lives and let them
know about ours (Lenhart et al, 2015).
2.2 Reduction of Communication Barriers
There are some sharing features available on the social media sites that can help people to
communicate their thoughts and their perceptions on various topics to a large number of
audiences (Perrin 2015).
2.3 Business Opportunities
A crucial factor in the lives of most of the people is the social media and the social
networks. It has become like a habit that whenever the laptops or the desktops are opened by us,
our favorite social media sites are accessed in order to check for any available new updates. This
importance of the social media to common people has been noticed by different businesses and
thus they also use the social media for advertisements of their firms and products (Scott 2015).
2.4 Addiction
It can be seen that the social media is nowadays accessed by all the people and
everywhere. Thus, extensive use of the social media may cause addiction to the users and they
will be posting something and checking posts and pages and eventually social media will be the
only important thing in their lives (Boyd 2014).

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2.5 Isolation
The use of social media has become extensive today and people are nowadays always on
the phone chatting and posting and checking posts. This has reduced the interactions with people
around. There has been reduction in face to face communications and meetings and it is always
online (Fuchs 2017).
2.6 Effect in Business Productivity
With the use of social media, it has become easier for the businesses to search for their
clients and communicate with them. As all this work has to be done online, the employees might
be distracted with their social media sites and might be more interested in checking their
accounts than doing their tasks given at work. This will in turn effect the productivity of a
company (Pfeffer, Zorbach and Carley 2014).
2.7 Safety of General Public
The advancement of the social media is huge and there are a huge number of online
frauds that are taking place nowadays. Thus, the extensive use of the social media is sometimes
considered as the leakage of information. People can collect this information and commit any
crime (Ngai, Tao and Moon 2015). For example, a person has posted on the social media that
they are going on a vacation for 5 days. These 5 days can be used by a thief to break in their
house and rob them or the by tracking the whereabouts of the family will be easier for any stalker
and they can be harmed. A lot of other situations can arise. Thus, it is important not to make
personal data public in order to be safe from the social media.
2.8 Phishing
One of the many techniques to extract personal data of an individual is phishing. With
this technique, sensitive information of an individual such as their usernames, passwords, details

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of credit cards and often money are extracted from the systems for wicked reasons (Shiller
2015).
3.0 Research Methodology
In this research, the analysis is mainly based on the people of the country and their
responses. It is mainly about what the people of the country think about the safety of the general
public using the social media. Thus, data has been collected for this analysis with the help of a
questionnaire (See appendix). The questionnaire contained 13 questions and the responses of 62
respondents have been recorded as valid responses. Some of the questions will be analyzed
quantitatively using appropriate statistical techniques and some other questions will be dealt with
qualitatively.
4.0 Data Analysis
At first, the demographic analysis of the respondents has to be done. Thus, the age group
of the respondents has been analyzed first. It can be seen very clearly from table 1 that most of
the respondents to this study belong to the age group of 16 – 25 years. There can be seen 45
respondents belonging to that age group. Only 4 responses have been recorded from teenagers
such as people of age below 15 years. It can be expected that the young people are much more
accustomed with the social media and their usage is maximum compared to the aged people of
the society. Thus, most of the respondents belonging to the age group of 16 – 25 years have been
an added advantage to the study. The number of respondents belonging to different age groups is
shown diagrammatically in figure 1.
Table 1: Age Group of the Respondents
Age Frequency

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16 - 25 45
26 - 35 9
36 - 45 4
Under 15 4
Grand Total 62
16 - 25 26 - 35 36 - 45 Under 15
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
Age of the respondents
Age
Frequency
Figure 1: Age Group of the Respondents
The next factor that will be analyzed is the number of passwords that a person might have
in order to secure their online social media accounts. Now, protecting the accounts with the help
of passwords is very important. This helps to keep data secure. For the increasing security, these
passwords are requested to change at regular intervals. Thus, it is very important to have more
than one password. It can be seen clearly from table 2 that the number of passwords is more than
5 for most of the people. 42 participants of the study have more than 5 passwords. Thus, it can be
said that most of the participants have more than 5 passwords and they are quite aware of the
problems that they can face if anyone hack into their systems and extract their personal data. The
distribution of the number of passwords of the respondents is given in figure 2.
Table 2: Number of Passwords given by the Respondents

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Number of Passwords Frequency
1 1
2 3
3 3
4 12
5 1
More than 5 42
Grand Total 62
1 2 3 4 5 More
than 5
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
Number of Passwords for Online Accounts
Number of Passwords
Frequency
Figure 2: Number of Passwords given by the Respondents
Next, the respondents were asked about their thoughts of how safe they feel on the social
media. Here, 1 indicates unsafe and 5 indicates safety. The respondents have rated their thoughts
about safety on a scale of 1 to 10. As it can be seen from table 3, there is a mixed response to this
question. A lot of people think that they are safe and a lot others do not think that they are safe.
Figure 3 shows the distribution of the ratings given by the respondents diagrammatically.
Table 3: Safety of the Respondents on the Social Media
Safety Scale Frequency
1 2
2 15
3 13

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4 19
5 12
Grand Total 61
1 2 3 4 5
0
5
10
15
20
Feeling of Safety
Total
Rating
Frequency
Figure 3: Safety of the Respondents on the Social Media
The respondents were also asked whether they know about Phishing before they
answered for this questionnaire. It can be seen that 56 respondents did know about phishing from
before answering this questionnaire. Thus, it is clear that most of the people do have an idea of
the online frauds that take place and hence it has to be found out whether even by knowing about
the problems people are becoming the victims of the problem. Table 4 gives the number of
people having the knowledge of phishing prior to answering the questionnaire. Figure 4 shows
the same details diagrammatically.
Table 4: Number of people with Knowledge of phishing prior to answering the
questionnaire
Knowledge of Phishing Frequency
No 6
Yes 56
Grand Total 62

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10%
90%
Knowledge of Phishing
No
Yes
Figure 4: Number of people with Knowledge of phishing prior to answering the
questionnaire
Next, in order to evaluate the victims of the major problem of phishing, a very disturbing
result has been obtained. Though from figure 4, it can be seen that only 10 percent of the people
are unaware of the problem of phishing, yet 24 percent of the people have been victims of the
problem of phishing. Thus, there are a lot of people who even by knowing the consequences of
phishing are not that interested in their personal security. These people have to be even more
careful to ensure their safety. This data is shown in table 5 and explained diagrammatically in
figure 5.
Table 5: Number of Victims of Phishing
Phishing Victim Frequency
No 47
Yes 15
Grand Total 62

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76%
24%
Phishing Victim
No
Yes
Figure 5: Number of Victims of Phishing
It can be clearly seen from table 6 that most of the victims of phishing belong to the age
group of 16 – 25 years. Hence, from here, it can be said that these young people do not much pay
attention about their safety and are not much bothered about it. If these young people do not start
making their accounts secure, it is just a matter of time until they face a serious problem due to
phishing. Figure 6 shows the distribution of the respondents who are victims and non victims of
phishing belonging to different age groups.
Table 6: Phishing Victims according to Age Groups
Age Group Phishing Victim Grand Total
No Yes
16 - 25 36 9 45
26 - 35 6 3 9
36 - 45 2 2 4
Under 15 3 1 4
Grand Total 47 15 62