Big Data Analytics: Security and privacy challenges

The digitalization of our day-to-day activities has resulted in a huge volume of data. This data, called Big Data, is used by many organizations to extract valuable information either to take marketing decisions, track specific behaviors or detect threat attacks. The processing of such data is made possible by using multiple techniques, called Big Data Analytics, which allow getting enormous benefits by dealing with any massive volume of unstructured, structured and semi-structured content that is fast changing and impossible to process using conventional database techniques. However, while Big Data represents an immense opportunity for many industries and decisions makers, it also represents a big risk for many users. This risk arises from the fact that these analytics tools consist of storing, managing and efficiently analyzing varied data gathered from all possible and available sources. The consequence is that people become widely vulnerable to exposure because of combining and exploring specific behavioral data. That is, it is possible to collect more data than it should have which leads to many security and privacy violations. Therefore, research community has to consider these issues by proposing strong protection techniques that enable getting benefits from big data without risking privacy. In this paper, we highlight the benefits of Big Data Analytics and then we review challenges of security and privacy in big data environments. Furthermore, we present some available protection techniques and propose some possible tracks that enable security and privacy in a malicious big data context.