Social Media & Threats

Social media has high potential in both a positive and negative regard. The authors describe how social media can be used to spread information extremely quickly. This is a useful feature to increase success for individuals and companies, but this also has a downside of the ease of spreading potentially false information. Therefore, there is a reason for hackers to attempt to take over others’ accounts. A total of “22% of internet users in the United States had their online accounts hacked at least once” (Batchelder). Furthermore, there are other harmful threats through social media. The authors describe phishing, scams, and malware that hackers can implement to harm users. With the availability of social media, these attacks are accentuated and even more successful. Lastly, with the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning, such as deep fakes, there is a new complexity to lying and faking things through social media. This can be harmful to cybersecurity, as attackers can even more easily fake who they actually are.