Security threats for big data: A study on Enron e-mail dataset

The world is advancing towards technological evolution day by day resulting in an exponential rise in Data. This massive volume of Data has introduced the idea of Big Data, which has captured the attention of business and IT scholars as a blessing and a source of immense opportunities for large organizations. Securing this huge amount of data has become a great concern in the field of information and communication technology. In this paper, we have conducted two studies to observe the security threats for big data: (a) first study was carried out on Enron email dataset (that contains about half a million of emails) to investigate the security challenges of big data in the field of email communication; and (b) second study was carried out on 35 undergraduate students to observe how phishing email generation based on users' intention or behavior may break the security system. The study results showed that big data analysis helps phishers to understand the behavior or interest of email users that can help them (phisher or hackers) to generate the phishing sites/emails to create big data security threats.