Ways in Which Cyber Worriers Use Social Networks to Gain Information

The battle by the aforesaid computer experts is fought on the front line of the computer by defending and attacking other systems. Cyber-warriors particularly those engaging in legitimate security roles conduct criminal operations act in a manner to leverage social networks to get information. The current day technology has paved way for both security specialists and cyber felons to be effective in the gathering of information. This collection of information by both parties has been made easier particularly due social networking platforms for example, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook to name but a few. Social networking sites involve one person to one-person communication as well as an individual to many other people which supports the attack platform. 2 Whenever a profiling cyber-warrior is collecting data on an individual, they accumulate crucial information that they can exploit.

For example, whenever a photograph is posted on social media and it happens to display locational information in its background, a cyber-warrior can work by taking advantage of understanding the target’s locale. In case these computer experts have a target in custody and uses the background data of an earlier posted photo where the individual lives, they can easily gain the new place’s data from the photographs that was posted in recent times. Upon comparison of photographed data from both the past and current, they can simply gain information on whether the individual of interest is home or not. With this information at hand, cyber-warriors can monitor an individual’s movement or at least eliminate possibility of one being in a certain location.

Just like with Facebook and Twitter, a cyber-warrior can identify the people a target follows often and this could be simply interpreted as someone they personally know. That said, these speculations help in determining a target(s). Another line of weakness but of great strength for a cyber-warrior in gathering information for profiling purposes is that most social media networks can be interconnected to each other and to other things of interest to the computer experts. For example, a single target can connect to Facebook via Pinterest and vice versa. Once a target can be followed through different social media, the data can be synchronized and shared for personal identification by various security organizations in understanding the entire threat to government systems and help in coming up with a best applicable solution for the national cyber defense.

Privacy-related fears in the use of online social networks may reduce the use of social networks. In particular, due to privacy-related concerns it was identified that users have reduced the amount of self-disclosure information and honesty as well as increased consciousness in revealing information in response to concerns regarding organizational threats and social threats. 5 As a results it is no longer easier for cyber-warriors to gain much usable information from online social networks as most of it could be falsified information. In conclusion, cyber-warrior can preferentially use social media platforms to obtain crucial information about a target and accurately profile the target for tracking the movement and eventually locate the target. This profiling is possible since social networking sites provides most of the info allied to either a person or an organization.