Essay Example on Social Media: A Growing Hub for Hackers & Crime

Social media has changed the way people commit crimes and has brought about the rise of hackers. Research by The University of Phoenix shows that 80% of the adults in the United States have a minimum of one social media account. As the use of social media is dramatically growing, so is the number of hackers has increased correspondingly. Social media offers most users the opportunity to communicate with friends and family, share moments captured in photos, and advocate for causes. The users, at times, underestimate their vulnerability and get careless to the point of not worrying about their passwords. It is as if they don’t comprehend how sophisticated the technology is.

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For instance, when someone downloads a free game, it asks the person to connect with other people. To ease the process, it further asks the person to list their friends from Facebook. By doing that, one establishes a new network that the friends and the sharing chain continue. If a hacker gets access to someone’s door, they can obtain all the contacts. Also, a hacker can obtain someone’s browsing and shopping history through one’s comments on social media. No matter how hard the users try to protect their personal information, they forget that passwords require unique components and regular changes. They also forget that social media posts can’t be deleted entirely and that using public Wi-Fi to access social media makes it easy for your details to be obtained by anyone using that hub. Additionally, all the information on social profiles is still exposed even when the user regulates the privacy settings. Social media has influenced the hacking culture by making users more vulnerable.

Conclusion

The digital media has reacted to hacking cases by creating an awareness of how to protect one’s privacy. The public has been reacting to social media hacking by limiting the confidential information they post. However, this is not enough because the hackers have multiple other tactics to access someone’s identity. One of the ways is through the theft of electronics (Beall, 2017). The second technique is the key-logger programs that are being put into a person’s device and be used to extract passwords and confidential data. Another way is through email addresses that people are always giving away. The email addresses let hackers approach people for confidential details like passwords. They pose as a trusted enterprise that the user associates with like a doctor’s office. Therefore, the public needs to be continuously educated and trained on how to uphold their privacy when using social media.

References

Beall, G. (2017). How hackers are using social media to hack. The Next Web. https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2017/08/23/hackers-using-social-media-hack/.

Survey Results on Data Security - University of Phoenix. Phoenix.edu. (2016). https://www.phoenix.edu/news/releases/2016/04/uopx-social-media-hacking.html.