The Importance Of Social Media Spam

2.1.7 Spam
Spam is any kind of unwanted online communication and mostly refers to commercial advertisements distributed online. Usually spam is received via email, text / instant message, and social media platforms (“What Is Spam? | Microsoft Security,” n.d.). Spam via email is the most common attack, but due to the recent fast growth of social media, the trend is moving towards spam in social media platforms. According to Symantec’s threat report, 70% of the social media spams were spread rapidly because users are easily tricked by posts made by social media “friends” (Symantec Corporation, 2015). Spam has decreased during 2014 though due to the take downs of large spam bots and successful spam blocking practices (European Union Agency for

During 2014, it has been observed that devices being stolen or lost are among the most important reasons leading to data breaches (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security, 2014).
2.1.11 Insider threat
The insider threat refers to threats coming from inside the organization initiated by internal or external staff. The attack might be a result of malicious insider activities or unintentional user errors, unintentional displacement of information and loss. Employees and external consultants with access to sensitive data present the greater risk for data breaches. Edward Snowden is a perfect example of insider threat as he breached some of the US government's most highly-classified secrets (MacAskill, 2013).
According to the ENISA report 2014, more than half of security professionals participated in the survey consider insider threats as being difficult to prevent (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security, 2014).
2.1.12 Identity theft /

Different threat agents commit cyber-crimes for different reasons. In the remainder of this section, most common threat agents are explained. The “2014 Cyberthreat Defense Report for North America & Europe” produced by the Cyber Edge Group (CyberEdge, 2014) indicates that organizations are more concerned about cybercriminals and malicious insiders (past, current, future employees or contractors), as opposed to other categories of threat agents.
Table 4 provides the visualization of top threats deployed by top threat agents (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security, 2014). For example, botnets is a threat that usually originates from hacktivists and cyber-criminals, while identity theft/fraud is a threat that is used by all threat