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By Michael Eggebrecht
Survey after survey has shown that an ever increasing number of corporate employees are using social networking sites in the office. Many people see this as a good thing -- social media is a powerful tool for collaboration, and staffers looking for answers to work-related questions often turn to networking tools. But it also exposes organizations to dangers that are likely keeping some IT security staffers up at night.
As sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have grown more popular, there has been some question about whether they have the security tools and policies needed to deal with a rapidly accelerating number of users. And because the sites' users are more trusting of the messages they get from their contacts, they have become a hot target for hackers. According to Internet security vendor Kaspersky Lab, "malicious code distributed via social networking sites is ten times more effective, in terms of successful infection, than malware spread via e-mail."
Max Kelly, head of security at Facebook, posted on the site's security blog last year that, "due to the nature of the Internet, and the nature of malicious software, most Web sites will at some point need to deal with patching a security hole. All good Web sites take these issues very seriously, since no one wants users to suffer."
No one doubts that Facebook and other social media sites take security seriously. But how effective are they in their efforts?
Last week, social networking sites were in the spotlight again, as a distributed denial-of-service-attack aimed at silencing a Georgian blogger brought Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal down for several hours. Critics say the sites didn't handle the attack as well as they should have. But more worrisome are these recent attacks:
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