Social media content and sentiment analysis on consumer security breaches

Abstract

Purpose Security breaches have been arising issues that cast a large amount of financial losses and social problems to society and people. Little is known about how social media could be used a surveillance tool to track messages related to security breaches. This paper aims to fill the gap by proposing a framework in studying the social media surveillance on security breaches along with an empirical study to shed light on public attitudes and concerns. Design/methodology/approach In this study, the authors propose a framework for real-time monitoring of public perception to security breach events using social media metadata. Then, an empirical study was conducted on a sample of 1,13,340 related tweets collected in August 2015 on Twitter. By text mining a large number of unstructured, real-time information, the authors extracted topics, opinions and knowledge about security breaches from the general public. The time series analysis suggests significant trends for multiple topics and the results from sentiment analysis show a significant difference among topics. Findings The study confirms that social media monitoring provides a supplementary tool for the traditional surveys which are costly and time-consuming to track security breaches. Sentiment score and impact factors are good predictors of real-time public opinions and attitudes to security breaches. Unusual patterns/events of security breaches can be detected in the early stage, which could prevent further destruction by raising public awareness. Research limitations/implications The sample data were collected from a short period of time on Twitter. Future study could extend the research to a longer period of time or expand key words search to observe the sentiment trend, especially before and after large security breaches, and to track various topics across time. Practical implications The findings could be useful to inform public policy and guide companies responding to consumer security breaches in shaping public perception. Originality/value This study is the first of its kind to undertake the analysis of social media (Twitter) content and sentiment on public perception to security breaches.

Sentiments analysis : Recitation of the concealed emotions of professionals during COVID-19

“…Sentiments analysis has found profound use in business and social domains. Impact Factors and sentiments score are good predicators of real time public opinions (Hao & Dai, 2016). The sentiments analysis is based on the words used in the text and analyse them based on the Plutchick's circumplex model (Plutchik,1997).…”

Role of sentiment analysis in social media security and analytics

“…In social media security, risk management deals with the challenges of knowing the impact of security incidents such as the incident response cost, consumer follow-up, and legal cost. The most damaging aspect of this is the loss of consumer trustworthiness, reputation, and commercial branding impact, which is irreparable in many senses (Chen, Li, Xu, Yan, & Wang, 2017;Hao & Dai, 2016;Pletea, Vasilescu, & Serebrenik, 2014). Risk management is based on the evaluation of consumer trustworthiness and perception of social media users towards consumer security breaches.…”

“…The major limitation of this work is the use of a simple sentiment analysis module based on just the sentimental word dictionary. Another work in this area that deals with consumer security breach is presented in Hao and Dai (2016). A framework has been proposed where the 113,340 were extracted, related to consumer security breach.…”

Unstructured Data for Cybersecurity and Internal Control

“…Social media can be a valuable tool for tracking security breaches, and sentiment score and impact factors are good predictors of public opinions and attitudes towards security breaches. Beyond text, images can also be used for identifying malware variants with accuracy of over 89% [20].…”