Can Social Networking Be Secure at Work?

05.05.2009
As more workers spend a greater part of their days on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, hackers have turned their energies toward spreading their malware across those services, harming workstations and company networks.

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That's the contention of a that occurred in the first quarter of this year and was conducted by the , an industry group aimed at enabling the safe use of social media in the workplace.

Increasingly, hackers have turned their attentions away from e-mail, in part due to the fact people spend more of their time communicating with friends, family and colleagues over mediums like Facebook and Twitter. In addition, the e-mail environment has reached a level of maturity that makes the new frontier of social networks more attractive to hackers and spammers, says David Lavenda, a vice president at t, a vendor that sponsored the study.

"E-mail is in a steady state," Lavenda says. "It's an electronic warfare game with spammers, filters and security tools, and it's reached some sort of status quo. With the new [social] tools, as people come online and get more involved with them, there is an opportunity to cause harm."

The list of security hacks on Web 2.0 and social networking sites were impressive, the report found. Nearly one-fifth were caused by authentication hacking (where someone is able to gather user names and passwords). Others included database hacking (21 percent), content spoofing (11 percent) and cross site scripting (XSS), an incident where malicious code runs on a webpage and eventually can enable phishing attacks.