Facebook the Most Dangerous Social Tool For Businesses 142
wiredmikey writes "According to a recent study Facebook is by far the most popular and most dangerous social media tool among small-to-medium-sized businesses, with 69 percent of respondents reporting that they have active accounts with this site, followed by Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Facebook is also the top culprit for malware infections and privacy violations, e.g. the leaking of sensitive company information. YouTube took the second spot for malware infection, while Twitter contributed to a significant number of privacy violations. For companies suffering financial losses from employee privacy violations, Facebook was again cited as the most common social media site where these losses occurred, followed by Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn."
Re:"Dangerous" is ambiguous (Score:3, Informative)
Malware is reportedly up about 50% this year. Wondering who the targets are?
GData Software , a German anti-virus firm, details some malware numbers. [gdatasoftware.co.uk]
People think its ok to use facebook at work? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Youtube? (Score:2, Informative)
How do you get infected with malware from youtube?
I'm thinking 2 ways: links in video descriptions/comments/etc and there was the recent XSS flaw.
Re:Slashdot in 2010 (Score:5, Informative)
Being generous and counting Android (even though it was only briefly owned by Google between the time Google bought it and the time Google transferred it to the Open Handset Alliance) as a "Google product", and going further with that generosity and counting a story about HTC Android phones as being about Android rather than the specific phones and thus a "Google product", I count 7 of the 18 current front-page stories that are either about social networking sites or Google and its product (one of which is about a forthcoming Google social networking product.)
Being even more generous and assuming that the two next most recent stories were also about social networking sites or Google and its products, that's still less than half of the last 20 stories.
Aren't "nerds" generally supposed to be detail-oriented and numerate?
Re:Is it Facebook or Windows which is dangerous? (Score:2, Informative)
Because the potential loss from NOT using Windows would be even greater. You can't run a small-medium sized retail business without Windows... there's no robust small to mid-sized point of sale system that's not Windows based. There's no functional accounting software that's not Windows based. There are simply not enough applications for most businesses to use anything BUT Windows. Even if there were enough applications for Mac's to run a particular basis, you're looking at double to quadruple hardware costs for plain ol' workstations.
Re:Is it Facebook or Windows which is dangerous? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'm a Mac user - this is news to me (Score:2, Informative)
A) the machine is using XP / browser without process sandboxing (this requires Vista/7)
B) the browser has admin privs (XP, or UAC disabled)
C) browser plugins are exploited / plugins can run without request
C is the default configuration for the three browsers but it can be changed. As a result, 99% of malware today is taking advantage of a plugin.
Re:Is it Facebook or Windows which is dangerous? (Score:3, Informative)
People push the idea because it's true. Take a look at the list of security vulnerabilities for almost any other platform, and you'll see several that could be exploited for distributing malware. Hell, the last iPhone 'jailbreak' was enough to get root access to the phone as a result of visiting a web page. From there, you could easily scan the person's inbox for 'sent from my iPhone' and send a mail to everyone who has that inane footer on their mails a link to the exploit and install something nefarious that runs in the background (maybe something that dials a premium rate phone number periodically). The Linux kernel has had at least one root exploit that I've noticed pop up in security advisories this year, and several more in the past.
Exploiting this stuff is not hard, but there's no point unless you can profit from it in some way. If Macs suddenly had 90% market share, OS X's poor security would be quite apparent. The same with pretty much any Linux distribution.
Writing cross-platform malware, however, is hard. If you don't have a monoculture, it's much harder for malware to gain a foothold.
Re:People think its ok to use facebook at work? (Score:2, Informative)