Security threats to enterprises from social media - CIOL Feature

Security threats to enterprises from social media

Social media platforms can cause a lot of information leak from organizations. This article discusses some key steps that can act as a guard against it

Shikhar Mohan Gupta

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

BANGALORE, INDIA: Social media is being touted as a great way to enhance your company's visibility amongst your target audience, and allow your own employees to interact with each other as well as the outside world.

While the former requires a well thought out strategy, the latter requires careful monitoring and control because there are lots of hidden security issues with it. This is besides the fact that they can reduce employee productivity and increase bandwidth costs because just about everyone would be hooked onto them.

Social engineering

There are lots of open communication channels in a company – email, SMS, phone, etc – that can be used to leak information. But, all of these can be monitored and the recipients tracked.

That's not the case with social media. If you announce something on Twitter, then all your followers will get it, and if they retweet it, all their followers will get it. If it was an interesting tweet, then it would be all over the Internet in a very short span of time.

The same thing goes for any other social media platform, be it LinkedIn, Facebook, Orkut, etc.The moment an information is made public, it can spread.

Also read: Facebook for business launched

Most social media platforms have communities that host to like minded people. Micro blogging through Twitter has inculcated a habit of posting all current activity online. As a human tendency to boast about their work, achievement and current status, employees might post critical information regarding a project etc that they are working on.

In this way, knowingly or unknowingly, the person has broadcast that info to the world. Those with malicious intent can utilize this loop hole to lure people to disclose important company information. Until and unless one is the admin for a particular online group, he does not have much say or control over the people joining it. Thus there is always the fear of the unknown.

So a company that has allowed access to social media must put down some thumb rules about its usage as a first step. Next step would be to monitor its usage and enable selective access. Further on, one could completely ban access to social media. Some of the ways to do this have been discussed later.

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