
Share insights from a seasoned technologist and seo engineer on how past network threats and malware evolved into social media risks, and outline basic safety measures for families and teenagers.
Learn best practices for secure and safe use of social media, identify risks from insecure use, and implement safety measures for platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
Learn essential terms used in this course, such as social bots, online social networks, identity clone attacks, online predators, cyberbullying, third party apps and services, geotagging, and zombie computers.
Explore key social media terminologies such as algorithms, engagement, hashtags, influencers, and viral content. Learn how trolls, bots, shadow banning, and other terms relate to safety and navigation.
Explore how industries from e-commerce to entertainment leverage social media for marketing, visual campaigns, and audience engagement across platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
Explore how social media threats compromise privacy and security, including account hacks and targeting by malicious actors, and learn essential counter measures to protect individuals and organizations.
Malware is malicious software that disrupts operations and steals credentials, spreading via social networks by hijacking profiles to form botnets and zombie armies for spam on Facebook and Twitter.
Explore identity clone attacks on social media, where attackers duplicate profiles to deceive friends and harvest data by targeting defense ministry officials.
Fake profiles threaten social media users by harvesting personal data, spreading propaganda, and enabling vulgar messages when accounts are hacked or impersonated, with social bots and duplicate accounts expanding reach.
Investigate cyberbullying as social media harassment, including hurtful messages and blackmail with embarrassing photos or videos, and its impact on children and teenagers.
Explore cyber blackmailing and kidnapping via social media, including doctored photos and videos. Analyze gendered risks, real-world cases, law gaps, and safety measures to counter these threats.
Review and manage personal information on social networks by evaluating what to share, recognizing optional versus mandatory fields, using dummy details to protect identity and personal safety.
Learn to protect your email accounts on social media by using disposable emails for signups, avoiding sharing contact lists, and managing privacy settings manually.
Protect social media accounts with unique, complex passwords, a password manager, and two-factor authentication with authenticator apps, while recognizing phishing, limiting third-party access, and updating privacy settings.
Ignore unknown friend requests from strangers; verify profiles with Google Images searches, monitor and clean your friend list for suspicious accounts, and involve parents in teens' safety.
Use unique, complex passwords for every site, with upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols, and keep them on paper with hints derived from each website name.
Examine privacy and security policy settings and counter-measures that protect your social media strategy. Review private settings, track updates, and agree to two basic policy elements, stopping use if uncomfortable.
Learn how security questions affect account safety, store passwords in a hard format away from email or cloud, and create memorable, self-owned questions and answers, even if not true.
Learn how joining online social groups like WhatsApp and Facebook creates soft targets for attackers, with vulnerabilities around exposing active cell numbers and group profiling.
Practice vigilance when sharing content on social media; treat everything as permanent, with uncertain privacy and possible distribution. Be selective with uploads and avoid location sharing.
Explore social media threats from third-party apps and services, minimize their use, and review account access by revoking permissions and passwords to reduce risk.
Learn how geotagging and GPS features reveal your location on social media and cameras. Disable geotagging when uploading photos online to protect your privacy from advertisers and others.
Learn how monitoring minors' social media accounts prevents cyberbullying, online predators, and oversharing, while guiding responsible digital behavior through open communication and appropriate rules.
Explore social media threats to privacy and well-being and learn practical countermeasures and security features to protect online and offline safety, staying updated on evolving threats.
This closing lecture emphasizes that social media threats and countermeasures are ongoing as technology evolves, builds on essential course material, and invites ongoing feedback to improve the course.
This course on Social Media Threats and Counter Measures is based upon the facts that we experience in our life since the inception of the social media. The key purpose of this course is to educate the masses about dark side of the social media along with counter measures.
Social media are Internet based communication and mutual interaction technologies. These are computer networks created for exchanging multimedia rich contents between users specially pictures and video clips. Social media (SM) sites are amongst the most widely used technologies on the Internet e.g Facebook, Google+, Linkedln, Twitter etc. These sites have hundreds of millions of daily users and the number is ever increasing with the advent of smart phones and 3G I 4G even 5G networks. People enjoy using Online Social Networks (OSN) to interact with families, friends and other people through sharing of experiences, pictures, videos, and other types of information. On the other hand social media also has a dark side which is rip with hackers, fraudsters, online predators and intelligence agencies; all capable of using OSN as a platform for targeting their next victim.
Unfortunately, most users are unaware of the security risks associated with social media platforms that mainly include breach of privacy, identity theft, malware, fake profiles, blackmailing and sexual harassment.
According to recent studies, many social media users expose intimate and sensitive personal details about themselves, their friends, families, personal relationships and organisations, either by posting photos or by directly providing information such as home/ office addresses/ phone numbers, current activities and location. Moreover, Facebook users tend to accept friendship requests from unknown people, who are sometimes friend of their friends. By accepting these friend requests, users unknowingly disclose their private information to total strangers. This information could be used maliciously, harming users both in the virtual and in the real world. These risks increase manifold when the users are children or teenagers who are more exposed and vulnerable than the adults. Horrifically, in some cases cyberbullying through social media can lead to catastrophic results like committing suicide by the affected children.
In this era of social media growth, we must keep some preventive measures while using social media. In this course following main topics have been covered:-
Introduction to the Social Media
Terminologies used in cyber world
Social Media Threats
Counter Measures
Conclusion
We hope the students will learn a lot from this valuable course.