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 networkssuch as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Snapchat boast billions of active users worldwide. Social mediaremains an invaluable tool to both organizations and individuals because of the ease of sharinginformation and media and the ability to both reach and engage specific audiences of interest. Due to itsmassive user base, communication ease, and data sharing, social media presents fertile ground for theconduct of cybercrime. Cybercriminals actively target social media users, use social media to facilitatetheir cybercrime activities, and advertise their criminal activities on social media. The potential dangersof cybercrime on social media necessitate that organizations institute cybercrime on social media policiesto 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 ifhearing 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 differencen CASM score was found between groups with and without hearing difficulties, although CASM scoreswere slightly lower for employees with hearing difficulties. The results suggested that more CASM trainingis needed for employees in the surveyed sectors.