Social media has its benefits — on a personal basis, you can connect with friends and family regardless of geographic location; professionally, especially for non-profit organizations, it is an effective avenue to share your mission and engage with your target audience. However, social media has its downsides, and more than ever, those involve scams. ZD Net brought this information to us in their article, “Researchers find 450,000 financial scams operating on social media.”
Financial scams have doubled in the past year on social media but only a small pool of cyberattackers appear to be behind the surge. If every scam claimed one victim on average, this would equate to $180,986,310 in total global losses due to social media-based financial scams.
Sadly, each successful attack can cost victims tens of thousands of dollars. On average the victim ends up losing $414 per scam, which is the work of a relatively small number of scam artists.
The challenge of detecting threats on social media is real. Affected organizations need to implement a combination of manual controls and automated, data-driven approaches to identify and eliminate external digital and social threats.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
