Cybersecurity Challenges in Social Media Erdal Ozkaya

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Overview of cyber threats 
Today’s cyber threat landscape keeps on expanding. It is almost like everyone who 
uses the Internet faces some kind of a cyber threat. There has been a surge of cyber-related 
criminal activity in the last few years. The more technology develops, the more new attacks 
come. At the same time, cybersecurity companies are seemingly playing catch up with 
attackers; they are responding only after new attacks have been discovered. There have been 
disturbing rumors that some government agencies, such as the US NSA, have a database of 
zero-day attacks that can be used to attack systems without being detected by any 
cybersecurity system (Storm, 2018). At times, these zero-day attacks have been known to get 
into the hands of the enemies. In May 2017, a ransomware called WannaCry caused 
devastation all over the world after it encrypted many computers leading to the shutdown of 
critical systems, loss of revenues and, sadly, loss of lives that depended on some of the 
attacked systems (Liptak, 2018). A hacking group called Shadow Brokers had allegedly 
stolen the zero-day vulnerability from the NSA and put it on the public domain (Shane, 
Perlroth & Sanger, 2018). The creators of WannaCry took it from there and developed the 
vicious attack tool that encrypted computers in seconds (Greenberg, 2018). 
This is a reflection of the current threat landscape. There is a lot of unpreparedness for 
the attacks to come. Organizations are having to resort to cyber resilience rather than 
depending fully on cyber defense. They are aware that there is no certainty that the security 
systems they have will be able to protect them from all the threat vectors. Individual users 
are, however, the unfortunate lot. With the limited technical knowledge that they have, they 
have been exposing themselves to many cyber threats. Attackers have, therefore, turned their 
guns against end users. 
Many social media companies have already disregarded the privacy of their users. 
They have been dangerously selling off sensitive information to third parties. This inherently 

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puts the security of the sensitive data no longer in the platforms’ hands but in the hands of 
unknown third parties. Overall, there is a lurking problem that everyone should be afraid of. 
The cyber threats that Internet users, more so, social media users, are facing are many.