A CAUTION IN SOCIALIZATION: A PRELIMINARY IDENTIFICATION OF PERSONAL SECURITY JEOPARDIZING HABITS AMONG SOCIAL MEDIA USERS IN MALAYSIA

Abstract

Social media is playing an important role to most people these days. People are using it to be connected among peers, updated with the latest information and also for e-commerce purposes. However, apart from its benefits there are others who would use the information obtained from social media in a malicious way such as harvesting personal information for black mailing, information manipulation and tele-marketing. This threat coupled with unsafe social media practice could expose the social media users to being manipulate into sharing sensitive and revealing information about them. In this paper, a preliminary investigation to identify distinct characterizations of unsafe social media habits is presented. For this study, we focused on one particular social engineering attack known as gatekeeper friending. In this attack, a would--be attacker or manipulator of information could exploit information shared over a social network and how an unsafe social media habits could expose its users to such attacks and exploitation. By identifying this habits we hope that a more secure and cautious code of conduct could be established to prevent unwanted disclosure of private information for malicious intention.