Companies see 70 percent jump in social networking spam in 2009
It would appear that companies are no longer worried about employees logging into social networks during business hours, but they are concerned about what that could be letting into their systems.
The Sophos report (PDF link) states that companies saw a 70 percent jump in social networking spam and malware attacks in 2009. Although many companies still block access to sites such as Facebook, Cisco Systems told the reporting firm that almost 2 percent of all online clicks in 2009 through 4,000 Cisco Web security appliances have been on social networking sites, 1.35 percent on Facebook alone. Try as companies might to block access, people are still checking their wall messages.
Having to accept the face that employees are getting on the sites, employers have expressed their concerns over which sites seem to post the most risk to the security of their corporate systems.
It isn’t surprising that Facebook tops the chart as it is the most popular network, what is surprising is that MySpace actually got 18 percent!
It isn’t just the spam and malware that employers are concerned about, though. Forming a majority of the firms surveyed, 72 percent of them believe that their employees are putting the company’s security at risk with their behavior on such sites. Spam saw the largest increase in the most recent study with a jump from 33.4 percent of firms seeing it a problem previously, skyrocketing up to 57 percent in the most recent study.
While the study hit the four most popular social networks in corporate culture currently, it was somewhat surprising to see LinkedIn as high as four percent because you never really hear of troubles on that site. However, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, said in a statement, “Sites like LinkedIn provide hackers with what is effectively a corporate directory, listing your staff’s names and positions. This makes it child’s play to reverse-engineer the email addresses of potential victims.” Some definite food for thought for those companies that had been considering what is essentially a resume site a non-threat.
Despite all these threats, 50 percent of the companies surveyed said they now allow access to Facebook, compared to just 13 percent last year. Yes, there are threats out there, but apparently companies aren’t that concerned if they have upped the amount of access they give to employees.
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