IJNSA 02

CYBERCRIME AWARENESS ON SOCIAL MEDIA: A COMPARISON STUDY
Wisdom Umeugo
Independent researcher, Ottawa, Canada

ABSTRACT
The popularity of social media has not waned since it gained popularity in the early 2000s. Social networks
such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Snapchat boast billions of active users worldwide. Social media
remains an invaluable tool to both organizations and individuals because of the ease of sharing
information and media and the ability to both reach and engage specific audiences of interest. Due to its
massive user base, communication ease, and data sharing, social media presents fertile ground for the
conduct of cybercrime. Cybercriminals actively target social media users, use social media to facilitate
their cybercrime activities, and advertise their criminal activities on social media. The potential dangers
of cybercrime on social media necessitate that organizations institute cybercrime on social media policies
to guard against these threats and provide employees with cybercrime awareness on social media (CASM)
training. CASM is important as corporate and personal use of social media becomes increasingly blurred.
This study attempted to measure the CASM scores of employees in security-critical sectors and determine if
hearing disability had any impact on the CASM scores. Employees of the education, finance, government,
information technology, legal, medicine, military, and Policing sectors in the United States were surveyed.
Results showed that the CASM score was average across all sectors. No statistically significant difference
in CASM score was found between groups with and without hearing difficulties, although CASM scores
were slightly lower for employees with hearing difficulties. The results suggested that more CASM training
is needed for employees in the surveyed sectors.

KEYWORDS
Social media, Cybercrime, Cybercrime on social media, Cybercrime awareness,
1. INTRODUCTION
Social media is a phenomenon that has been around for a while. Popular social media platforms
like Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter need no introduction. Many social
media platforms evolved in the early 2000s, revolutionizing how people and businesses
communicated and shared information [1], [2]. Social media eased the creation and sharing of
diverse media with population segments of interest on their platform [1]. Social media also
became the fastest way to grow business enterprises and brands by providing a platform to
recruit, disseminate information, advertise, and maintain a branding presence [1]. As a result of
its importance and diverse uses, organizations now include social media as part of their
competitive strategies [3]–[5]. Organizations use social media for marketing [6], brand awareness
[7], customer relationship management [8], reaching buyers across diverse geography [9],
recruitment [10], and customer engagement [7]. Private and corporate social media use has
become blurry because employees interact with social media as individuals in both professional
and personal manners using organizational and personal devices [4].
Despite the popularity and benefits of using social media, the use of social media in both
organizational and personal capacities carries risks and dangers. Various threats lurk on social

media that have been identified and classified. Al Hasib [11] organized social networking threats
into privacy-related threats due to the posting of private information on social media,
information security threats which are generally known security threats on social media such as
worms, viruses, and cross-site scripting, and identity-related threats such as phishing, friending
malicious actors, profile squatting, stalking, and corporate espionage. Similarly, Fire et al. [12]
classified Social media threats into (a) classic threats, which are general threats to the internet
such as malware, phishing, spammers, fraud, and cross-site scripting; (b) modern threats such as
clickjacking, fake profile, identity cloning, information leakage, and location leakage that target
users’ personal information; (c) combination threats that combine modern threat methods and
classic threat attacks; (d) attacks targeting children, such as online predation and cyberbullying.
Most of these threats constitute part of larger cybercrimes on social media. Social media is now a
medium for all sorts of internet-based crimes, and there is little awareness of these cybercrimes
on social media [13]. Social media is also a communication medium for criminal activity due to
its speed of information dissemination and short response time [13]. Many known cybercrimes
have been highlighted and discussed in the research literature [2], [14]. Notable cybercrimes
committed on social media platforms include cyberbullying, hacking, selling illegal things,
spreading disinformation, fraud, spam, advertising illegal stuff, and sharing illegal techniques
[15].