Covers how social media can expose personal data, spread scams, enable account takeover, and provide channels for influence or abuse.
Search across headline titles and summaries.
Background for this topic.
Social media comprises online services where people and organizations publish content, communicate, and form networks. The term covers public posts, private messages, groups, live streams, advertising systems, and the APIs and third-party applications that process platform data.
For security teams, these platforms expose identity, relationship, and behavioral information that can support targeted phishing, impersonation, or social engineering. Compromised accounts may be used to distribute malicious links or fraud, while excessive sharing and poorly controlled integrations can expose personal or corporate data. Relevant controls include strong authentication, phishing-resistant account recovery, least-privilege access for connected applications, monitoring for brand and executive impersonation, and clear retention and privacy policies. Public posts and platform telemetry can also provide threat intelligence, but collection and use may be constrained by privacy obligations and applicable data-protection rules.
In an educational game called "Capture the Narrative," students created bots to sway a fictional election, simulating influence in real-world political scenarios.
A nascent Android remote access trojan called Mirax has been observed actively targeting Spanish-speaking countries, with campaigns reaching more than 220,000 accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads through advertisements on Meta
The North Korean hacking group tracked as APT37 (aka ScarCruft) has been attributed to a fresh multi-stage, social engineering campaign in which threat actors approached targets on Facebook and added them as friends on the social media platform, turning the trust-building exercise into a delivery channel for a remote access trojan called RokRAT