Social Media Intelligence as a Tool for Conducting Intelligence Activities

The information security of an organization must be based on the ability to guarantee the confidentiality and integrity of information relating to intellectual property, production processes, technological processes, business plans and in particular the data held regarding potential threats. In such a context, the massive and indiscriminate use of social media by company employees represents a huge vulnerability for information security. Accordingly, social espionage can be defined as an attempt to gain a competitive advantage by acquiring all publicly and semi-publicly available information in social media. In this regard, Social Media Intelligence activities, which are essentially based on the use of platforms capable of searching, collecting, filtering and assembling a considerable amount of useful information from social media, have taken on a decisive role. In this paper, we aim to analyze the phenomenon of social espionage and focus on two relevant ways of conducting it in the context of social media intelligence, briefly reviewing the main characteristics of both of them. The first one is the use of Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT) platforms to capture social data streams that can be employed to learn useful information, for example, about the company where someone is employed. The second one is related to fake social profiles suitably constructed to capture the information held in different social conversations.