Social Media Security Threats And Your Business
Why You Need To Take Social Media Security Threats Seriously In Your Business
Security and social media sites are a combination that presents unique challenges for individuals as well as businesses. The real-time environment and communications are only part of the attraction. As you can imagine, this real-time aspect also provides unique, powerful, and dangerous opportunities for those who would do you, or your business, harm.
Just a few well-known risks involve Facebook images with worms, and the uncertainty of what’s behind all those shortened URLs on Twitter. Also, many social media resources and tools are hosted on third party websites which makes it even more difficult to know their levels of security or trustworthiness.
Here are some interesting numbers regarding security and social media sites:
- According to the Sophos Security Threat Report (Jan 2010), for 2009 there was a 70% increase in the proportion of businesses reporting spam and malware attacks originating from social network websites. Over one third of these businesses reported receiving malware attacks from social media sites.
- Also, more than 72% of these firms feel employee behavior on social media sites pose dangers to the security of their businesses.
- According to SC Magazine, respondents to their studies consider Facebook to be the biggest threat to security, then followed by MySpace and Twitter.
There are a number of measures companies, and individuals, can put into place to protect their assets, and that includes both in and out of the firewall. But the one strategic action everyone should take is to become aware of the risks involved with social media sites.
Risk awareness is critical because you will not take any protection measures if you’re not aware of potential threats.
Threat mitigation is another recommended and desired strategic action. Putting these safeguards into place, after the fact, can be a very painful lesson learned.
Here are additional tips and resources to decrease social media security threats:
You are an integral mitigating force in the overall arsenal. So, remember to “Think before you click.” Obviously that is not total protection. But have you ever been rushed, or maybe even excited to check something out, and you clicked on a link almost automatically? Have you ever done that and had something unpleasant happen? Well, that happens all the time all over the world.
So just try to remember to think before you click.
Shortened links - They’re great for saving space in the Twitter micro-blogging world. You’ve seen them, most likely: tinyurl, Bit.ly, or is.gd. But the obvious risk they pose is hiding the destination URL. What you need is a scanner to check shortened links such as:
Disclaimer: No tool is 100% perfect.
Expanded links - Expanded links are of the kind that reveal the website domain. For example, www.wordpresssecured.com/wpsecurity can be called an expanded link. But still, you could be unaware of what exactly is on the page behind the link. There could be a malware threat, virus, or other threat waiting for you. So to counter that, you can use an expanded link scanning tool:
Disclaimer: No tool is 100% perfect.
http://searchengineland.com/googles-safe-browsing-diagnostic-tool-14064
http://linkscanner.explabs.com/linkscanner/default.aspx
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