Emerging social media threats: Technology and policy perspectives

Traditional cyber threats or attacks have targeted information and communication infrastructure that usually result in economic loss. Typically, launching these attacks requires an advanced skill level. Governments around the world have a good understanding of these threats and therefore have put in place many policies to deal with them. The rapid growth of social media is giving rise to new types of threats that spill over from the cyber world to real-life. These threats profoundly alter the psychological, social and cultural dynamics of vulnerable social media users. Also, it is becoming increasingly easy even for an average user to exploit social media for malicious purposes. Organizations and governments are finding it difficult to accurately detect, identify, predict, and prevent the malicious exploitation of social media. Quantifying the socio-psychological effect of social media vulnerabilities is another major challenge. Due to these reasons there is a lack of policies to deal with this issue. In this paper, we discuss several challenges in this emerging area, from technologies to policies.