Economic espionage via fake social media profiles in the UK: professional workers awareness and resilience

Abstract This paper explores the use of fake social media accounts for economic espionage. It focuses solely on the first step of the recruitment process, the link requests. There has been very little research on economic espionage and none on the use of fake social media profiles as a means of recruitment. The methodology is built upon an inductive approach based on a survey of 2,000 UK professionals who use social media for professional purposes to provide practical and theoretical insights into the problem drawn from a Qualtrics panel. The results illustrate that a quarter of professionals are ill-prepared for the threat of fake social media profiles for the purposes of espionage because they either do not check link requests or accept them even with risky attributes. It further finds a substantial minority are carelessly indifferent to information security and computer network security, and are so indifferent to the identities behind link requests that they auto-link with everyone. The paper also explores the homophily-heterophily orientation of professionals. It argues that homophily-orientated professionals tend to reject profiles with espionage characteristics, whilst heterophily-orientated professionals are susceptible because they embrace social difference. The practical implications are that employers need to strengthen their information security training programmes, the security services need to be more explicit in characterising the threats, and regulation is required to force the social media companies to focus on tackling the fake profile problem.