Facebooking at Work? You May Be Putting Your Company at Risk
You may be lucky enough to work in an office that doesn’t restrict social networking, but that doesn’t mean your bosses trust you. According to a new survey conducted by British research firm Sophos, 72% of firms believe their employees’ activities on social networking sites could endanger their business’s security. Other data backs up that fear: The number of businesses that were targets for spam increased from 33.4% in April 2009 to 57% in December, a dramatic increase in such a short time period.
With Facebook reaching 350 million worldwide users and basically forcing users to open up their profiles, the rise in spamming isn’t a big surprise. Facebook was deemed the most potentially dangerous network, with 60% of businesses saying they believe Facebook presents the biggest security risk, significantly ahead of MySpace at 18% and Twitter at 17%. LinkedIn was deemed the safest of the popular social networks, with only 4% claiming it as a security risk.
Seventy percent of the firms surveyed reported spam and malware attacks via social networks during 2009. And if your company has a blog (or if you’re Engadget), you may have noticed an increase in comment spam: According to spam filtering service Akismet, a huge 83% of all blog comments are spam.