IT concession No. 8: Your company’s deepest secrets are only a tweet away
Your employees are using social networks at work, whether they’re allowed to or not. According to Palo Alto Networks’ May 2011 Application Usage and Risk Report, Facebook and Twitter are in use at some 96 percent of organizations.
The problem? According to Panda Software’s Social Media Risk Index, one-third of small to midsize businesses have succumbed to malware infections distributed via social networks, while nearly one out of four organizations lost sensitive data when employees spilled the beans online.
“The behavior of people using social media is like their behavior using email 10 years ago,” says Rene Bonvanie, vice president of worldwide marketing for Palo Alto Networks. “With email, we’ve learned to never click on anything. But inside social media, people click on every tiny URL because they trust the sender. That’s why botnets we successfully rebuffed five years ago are now coming back via social media. It’s a big risk and we see it all the time.”
Even organizations that use social media security solutions or data loss prevention tools can’t keep Facebook fans or Twitter heads from spilling company secrets or other embarrassing facts to the world, says Sarah Carter, vice president of marketing for Actiance, a maker of Web 2.0 security tools.
“What’s most important is education,” says Carter. “Educate, re-educate, and educate again. Put technology-coaching solutions in place, where you can remind users of the risks regularly and remind them also of your company policy about visiting sites that are not relevant to business.”
Read the rest at: 10 hard truths IT must learn to accept | It management – InfoWorld.
