Security issues associated with Social Media - Essay Example

Similarly, social medical security concerns have dominated the highlights in the last few decades, (Ludlow, 1996). With various social media products, the default setting spread everything and clients have to set their views to privatize their accounts. These practices open up various security concerns because various people gains access to personal information. With modern cases of malware, phishing and spam, social media products create various security issues. Cybercrime can hack information about a user from his social networking posts or profile and shape his attacks in accordance to his like and interests.

Experts define this as social engineering, an act that makes security risks increasingly hard to recognize. Some social media users share large private information amount in their social media products such as Facebook and MySpace. Such information entails personal, demographic and other information, pictures and videos. Various clients publish their information publicly and any careful thought. Therefore, social media has turned out to be a main pool of sensitive information. Additionally, users of social media are mainly confident on their colleagues.

They constantly incline to friend requests and entertain sent items. This may compromise personal details that hackers may take advantage of to attack users. Similarly, inadequate physical contact on such social media products can reduce the natural defenses of users, resulting into people revealing private information to strangers and enemies, (Dhillon, 2002). Sharing private information such as passwords, contact details, images and other confidential information in social media products is increasingly dangerous.

Theoretically, a person can find out the city you reside and your whereabouts at a certain hour of the day. With the help of the pictures, the person can show up and pretend to be a long lost relative who is lucky and need some financial assistance. Inadequate physical contact allows false profile creation, for instance, a user may think he is chatting with his family member (brother or sister) while he is chatting with a stranger from another place. Excessive chatting on social media sites can create unnecessary gossips about the organization that an employee works and its strategic goals and plans, while unscrupulous rival can engineer workers into disclosing company’s intellectual property, (Quigley, 2005).

In some cases, hackers go direct to the source and inject malicious passwords or codes into social media sites such as internal advertisements and third-party applications. For instance, in Twitter, summarized URLs are utilized to trick clients into opening malicious sites, which can extract individual or organizational data if accessed via office computer. Similarly, Twitter is mainly vulnerable to this mechanism as it is possible to tweet a posts to be posted and revealed to a million of people.

Hacking of accounts is not mainly a security issues from the friends circles angle, it is extremely risky to workers and users too. Poor management of accounts passwords and unencrypted connections are a risky mix that may result to hijacks of accounts and the possibility for adverse reputational