Volume 15, Number 2

Cybercrime Awareness on Social Media: A Comparison Study

  Authors

Wisdom Umeugo, Independent researcher, 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