Cybersecurity Challenges in Social Media Erdal Ozkaya

3.5
 
Challenges in social engineering 
3.5.1
 
Threat vectors 
One of the biggest challenges in social engineering is determining who the foe is. 
Social engineers are just normal people, they speak so, act so, and at times have undergone 
some training to avoid arousing suspicion. Therefore, these threat vectors are invisible until it 
is too late. It is common for an old friend to hit someone up on social media to catch up. It 
will not come out as suspicious if that old friend asks for some money to get him out of a 
tight spot. The same scenario can be orchestrated by a social engineer on social media 

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platforms. All that the attacker will need is a good profile picture of the actual friend to use it 
to validate the whole pretext. Therefore, the attacker is always concealed and it is difficult for 
a victim to tell that he is being attacked (Thompson, 2006). It is not the normal type of an 
attack where the attacker is easily known. At times, it is the victim that will willingly give out 
money or information to the social engineer. All that the social engineer needs to do is come 
up with the perfect pretext such as a young attractive girl looking for a close friend on social 
media. 
3.5.2
 
Enterprise security 
A social engineering attack can have consequences to an enterprise even if it is an 
individual employee that is attacked. Some attacks have blown-back consequences to the 
enterprise as a whole. If a social media user is going through Facebook on his workstation 
during lunchtime and suddenly finds one of these enticing malicious links, clicking on it may 
cause viruses to be planted on the organization computer. If that workstation is not secured, 
the virus could jump to another workstation and slowly start propagating all over the 
network. All this will have been a result of the actions of the single user that was browsing 
Facebook on a workplace computer. Therefore, enterprise security is easily linked to the 
security of a user.