Companies Blocking Social Networking Sites Going Up

Security firm ScanSafe's latest survey has uncovered that companies are increasingly blocking social networking sites. 20% increase was recorded by the security firm in the number of companies which blocked these sites during February-July 2009 among their customer base. With this, the figures reach upto 76% of companies blocking social networking sites.

According to the director of product management at ScanSafe, Spencer Parker, businesses could be highly exposed to the malware threat by the social networking sites, or else the bandwidth and productivity of the organization could be at stake, reported Sourcewire.com on August 19, 2009.

Social networking websites have emerged as a breeding ground for cyber crooks for past some time. Two of the most famous social networking sites - Twitter and Facebook - have recently suffered a lot of onslaughts by malware distributors.

In the third week of August 2009, Jose Nazario, security expert at Arbor Networks, detected an attempt of cybercriminals to use Twitter as a command and control to send instructions to compromised PCs, as per the news published by Security Watch on August 18, 2009. After that, several other security firms like Symantec have conducted comprehensive research in this field.

Symantec has reported that fake Twitter messages are being used to circulate newer and fresher malicious download links.

It is noted that Koobface worm has continuously been enjoying success in infecting the users' PCs. Several malware campaigns targeted at Facebook have struck the headlines in the last several months. At the beginning of this year, Kasperky Lab reported that malicious attacks over social networking sites were 10 folds more effective in comparison of those launched over e-mails.

Mark Guntrip, senior product marketing manager, ScanSafe, commented that with the rising popularity of social networking sites and the recent threats, it's quite obvious for the trend to shoot up, reported SCMagazine on August 19, 2009. In his views, it's an attack on both the security and productivity of the company.

As a result, some businesses are worried that they could lag badly behind in this extremely competitive business world and thus, most of them have opted to block social networking sites so that their employees may remain focused on their jobs only.

Related article: Companies Should Report Cybercrime

» SPAMfighter News - 8/29/2009