Social media is an ever-expanding platform that allows people to communicate with one another, but for businesses, it’s also the first forewarning of a malicious attack. Here’s everything you need to know about social media threat monitoring.
Social media threat monitoring software continuously crawls and indexes sites to monitor for potentially malicious attacks or intent to attack, whether physically or online.
The world of cybersecurity is ever-changing, and as businesses evolve to match the growing sophistication of fraudsters and hackers, so must they address the risk of threats on social media.
What Is Social Media Threat Monitoring?
Social media is the first connection a business has with the outside world. From a communications standpoint, it’s easy to see how social media platforms are relevant. They’re a great way to send out feelers to see how customers are feeling about the business and the products it creates.
Social media threat monitoring utilizes software programs’ learning and indexing capabilities to filter and identify threats dynamically.
Cyber threats represent a significant risk for companies since all companies—those that want to thrive in the modern world—have an online presence to connect with consumers. Threats can come in any form, but the goal of a malicious hacker is to steal information, damage communication systems, and disrupt operations.
These malicious attacks can come from anywhere, including disgruntled employees, malware creators, other corporations, and even terrorists.
Suppose a business contains personal data, which an overwhelming majority do. In that case, lax social media threat monitoring becomes a liability, especially when internet users in the company are unaware of online abuse, scams, or malicious activity.
Social media is a beautiful thing in its purest form, but dangers abound online:
- Violence
- Misuse of personal information
- Illegal content
- Persecution and harassment
- Scams
- Malware
- Phishing
- Cyberbullying
All these activities are harmful, and as the perpetrators of those unethical and illicit activities continue to collaborate and grow more sophisticated, it is the responsibility of forward-thinking businesses to monitor their social media accounts and the tendrils connecting it to the outside world for threats.
How Does Social Media Threat Monitoring Work?
At its core, social media threat monitoring works by spotting potentially harmful, violent, or unacceptable behavior and alerting the individual whose responsibility is to assess those threats.
Of course, for the sagacious business, the first step should be to instill computer literacy in their employees.
Teaching individuals to exercise caution on social media can prevent oversharing and help employees recognize a malicious email when they spot one.
The process can be automated using machine learning, which can help the software identify potentially malicious activity.
Such a program would act like alerting social media staff to posts threatening violence against a business or automatically filtering out malware-laden emails to business employees at a bank. the process is split up into several stages.
- Monitoring – Social media threat monitoring software constantly observes online activity to recognize threats.
- Identification – Each business has a different set of criteria for what denotes a threat, and the software is usually catered to the business’s individual goals.
- Verification – Once the threat monitoring system has flagged something, it alerts someone who will verify whether the media is a threat.
Final Thoughts
Social media threat monitoring software is invaluable for businesses to sort through the clutter and bring credible threats to light, with the end goal being prevention.
The widespread nature of social media calls for some level of automation in the social medial environment. When paired with an expert human eye, it can prevent threats before they happen.