Security Threats for Big Data: An Empirical Study

With the advancement of modern science and technology, data emerging from different fields are escalating gradually. Recently, with this huge amount of data, Big Data has become a source of immense opportunities for large scale organizations related to various business sectors as well as to information technology (IT) professionals. Hence, one of the biggest challenges of this context is the security of this big set of data in different ICT based organizations. The fundamental objective of this article is to explore how big data may create security challenges in email communication. As an outcome, this article first shows that big data analysis helps to understand the behavior or interest of email users, which in turn can help phishers to create the phishing sites or emails that result in IT security threat; second, the article finds that phishing e-mail generation based on the (email) users' behavior can break an organization's IT security; and finally, a framework was proposed that would help to enhance the security of email communication.