# Risk Perceptions on Social Media Use in Norway
## 5 Analysis and Results
### The Consequences of ID Theft
#### 5.3.2 Consequences of Social Media ID Theft  
We asked the respondents about the consequences they had suffered because of the ID theft. The question had a free text open answer, and we have categorised and quantified the overall answers in Table 25. The main result is that 65% of the respondents were not able to attribute or find out exactly why their account was hacked and did not suffer any consequences. The respondents had difficulties answering how their accounts had been abused. When they managed to attribute what the hackers did, it was usually because they used the account for spam (10%) or phishing (8%). To be more specific, 10% of people experienced the consequence that their account was used to send out spam messages, and 8% of people had the account send out phishing messages or that the account was used in other phishing campaigns. A total of 5% experienced blackmail from the compromise; the hacked account contains much personal information, especially if one uses the social media as their primary chatting application, which an attacker can use to blackmail the owner of an account. Another re-occurring topic in the answers is that several who got hacked were quick to regain control of the account: several of the written responses detail that the ID theft had negligible consequences because it got detected immediately primarily through a \"log on from new device\" email notification. This security mechanism allowed them to respond quickly to the event and mitigate the consequences. Analysing the sample, none of our respondents suffered very serious consequences from the ID theft, such as for example, being swindled for large sums of money or being severely exposed or harassed online. However, the sample does contain descriptions of serious consequences: One respondent describes being locked out from her Facebook and Instagram accounts, both of which were corporate accounts. She also got exposed online through the hack and describes the experience as traumatising. The consequence was that she locked down her accounts and stopped her online initiatives. Another respondent had his account abused by the hacker for buying and selling items. The respondent did not detail his answer beyond writing that _\"It created problems for me\"_. Account lockout with the additional workload to regain control described as the primary consequence. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l} \hline \hline
**Believed Reasons of Compromise** & **Count** \\ \hline Phishing & 8 \\ \hline Shared the password with & 2 \\ someone I have relations with & \\ \hline Hacked & 15 \\ \hline Other & 3 \\ \hline No/don’t know & 19 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 24: Stated reasons of account compromise. N = 47. The group who answered that they had not experienced having their social media profile hacked was asked how they thought a compromised social media account could be abused. This was a voluntary question which received 197 answers, whereof some respondents answered multiple consequences which were counted individually. Table 26 shows that 40 respondents answered _impersonation/ID theft_ as the consequence of a compromised social media account, here the users talked about their profile being used for malware spreading or other nefarious acts that tries to portray the hacker as them. Typically referred to as a _masquerade attack_ in the literature. _Manipulation_ is people talking about either the account used for sharing of propaganda or sharing of fake news. Active account abuses such as _spam_ (26), _spread malware_ (23) and _phishing_ (17) follow as the most commonly perceived consequences. These are instances where the attacker abuses the hijacked account to attack others. Further down the list, we find consequences such as _swinding_ and _blackmail_ which are primarily motivated by financial gain.