The Paradox of Social Media Security: A Study of IT Students’ Perceptions versus Behavior on Using Facebook

<p>Social media plays an essential role in the modern society, enabling people to be better connected to each other and creating new opportunities for businesses. At the same time, social networking sites have become major targets for cyber-security attacks due to their massive user base. Many studies investigated the security vulnerabilities and privacy issues of social networking sites and made recommendations on how to mitigate security risks. Users are an integral part of any security mix. In this thesis, we explore the relationship between users’ security perceptions and their actual behavior on social networking sites. Protection motivation theory (PMT), initially developed to study fear appeals, has been widely used to examine people’s behavior in information security domains. We propose that PMT theory can also be adapted to explain and predict social media users’ behaviors that have security implications. We use a web-based survey to measure users’ security awareness on social networking sites and collect data on their actual behavior. </p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science in Information Technology (MSIT)

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Information Technology

Year dc:date.available

2016

Author dc:creator

• Alqubaiti, Zahra Y

Contributors dc:contributor

• Dr. Lei Li
• Dr. Svetlana Peltsverger
• Dr. Kyung Hun Jung

• Social media
• protection motivation theory
• security
• vulnerability
• user’s behavior
• awareness
• threats
• IT students
• Facebook
• Information Security

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/msit_etd/3

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu:msit_etd-1003