Facebook the Most Dangerous Social Tool For Businesses

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."

Comments

I believe this claim about Facebook's "danger"

[93 Escort Wagon]

I've seen people do some really dumb stuff on Facebook that they almost certainly wouldn't do elsewhere.

A few weeks ago, there was a viral (in the true sense of the word) page that got popular really fast - I think it claimed to let you see who'd un-friended you, but I might have that bit wrong. Anyway, after an acquaintance got hit by this, I went to check it out. Basically this page said "here's how you do it - just copy and paste the following into your browser's address bar". This was followed by what was pretty obviously a bunch of hex instructions (likely obfuscated javascript, but maybe vbscript) that apparently downloaded harmful code to the user's computer - and since the code was entered by the user, it didn't raise any red flags (maybe only by IE, maybe by other browsers as well - I didn't take it any further).

I can't imagine anyone in this day and age going to a random website and following these instructions - but on Facebook they were happy to! It was so breathtakingly stupid I had a hard time believing people fell for it; but they obviously did.