Cybersecurity Challenges in Social Media Erdal Ozkaya

Chapter Seven: Conclusion 
7.1
 
Preamble 
The previous chapter has looked at the threats in cyberspace that are a result of social 
media. It has reviewed the existing policies in organizations that have been partially able to 
secure against these threats. It has then come up with its own threat intelligence, a framework 
to mitigate the threats, user awareness training, and how to recover. It was the last in the 
many chapters that have delved exhaustively into the issues surrounding social media 
security. The following section will highlight the contributions by each chapter.
 
7.2
 
Contribution of chapters 
Each chapter in this thesis has been substantial by touching on key pieces of 
information. Chapter 1 has introduced the thesis and its subject matter. It has given the 
overview of cyber threats and then narrowed down to a particular one, user privacy. In user 
privacy, the chapter has isolated social media privacy issues to be the concern of this thesis. 
In developing the basis for the choice of this issue, the chapter has explained the motivation. 
There are two categories of problems that the chapter identifies that form up the discussions 
in the whole research. It identifies the problems emanating from privacy violations by social 
media companies and then mentions the issue of attackers that lurk on social media. The wide 
scope of the research is discussed, the objective stated, and the contributions of the thesis 
discussed. 
Chapter 2 has acknowledged the works done on this topic by other researchers. It has 
first explained for how long the problem has existed thus leading to research on it. From the 

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many researches that have been done on the topic, the chapter selects four. These four are of 
particular importance to this topic; in this, they approach social media privacy from 
interesting viewpoints. The chapter has, therefore, explained what has been done so that this 
research can cover some of what has been left out. The discussed literature laid down the 
foundation of the research in a better way and gave several lenses on how the problem can be 
viewed. 
Chapter 3 has discussed one of the vices that have grown of late due to social media 
and social engineering. It has introduced the users to social engineering and taken them 
through some of the key phases in a social engineering attack. Of importance to note is that 
the discussed phases are not strictly followed during attacks. This is because social engineers 
capitalize on the chances that avail themselves and also due to the preference of social 
engineers to remain fluid during an attack. The chapter has established the relationship 
between social media and social engineering. It has exposed social media as the main avenue 
through which social engineers are either gathering information about targets or just directly 
attacking them. After the establishment of this connection, the chapter has looked at the main 
challenges of social engineering as an attack. It has discussed the invisibility of the threat 
vector. It has explained that the attacker is hardly known until it is too late and damage has 
been done. The other challenge that has been explained is that of enterprise security. It has 
been discussed in the perspective of one user leading to the compromise of the security of an 
entire enterprise. This chapter has also proposed some solutions to particularly deal with 
social engineering. 
Chapter 4 has been the main meat of the thesis that has gone through the study done 
in this thesis. It has discussed several things about the study. The collection of data via 
samples and surveys has been discussed. It has highlighted the optimal number of 
respondents that were expected to take the survey and those that eventually did. It has then 

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discussed how the data was processed and analyzed to come up with usable figures. A 
discussion of what the results say has been given to help put everything into the perspective 
of social media security and privacy. Based on the results, some recommendations have been 
made to address the social media privacy and security issues. The study has identified three 
key points from which these solutions must be implemented. These are users, governments, 
and social media companies. The recommendations have been duly explained to show their 
practicality and potential for effectiveness in dealing with the problems highlighted by the 
research.
Chapter 5 has then looked at more general threats in the cyberspace that have come up 
due to social media. The chapter has evaluated the existing policies in organizations that have 
been put up to deal with these threats. To better understand the threats, the chapter has also 
developed tactical threat intelligence on these threats. Based on this intelligence, a mitigating 
framework has been developed to help organizations deal with them. Again, the issue of user 
awareness has been brought to light just to emphasize its importance when dealing with 
social media threats. Finally, the chapter ends by explaining how a user can recover from 
unfortunate events where social media threats prevail.