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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."
Dangerous in what form? I don't get that.
For malware specficially, well I guess that isn't surprising, I have a facebook account and I always see my friends posting links that are clearly spam. I guess some other people see this and click on it (by accident or not) and then they get infected too, and so it spreads.
Almost all of the last 20 or so stories have been about either social networking sites or Google and its products. Man, I remember when programming topics actually used to make it to the front page. You know, news for nerds.
Oh my lord... there's MALWARE on Facebook?? I thought all those links for free iPads were real! Noooooo!!!
This shouldn't surprise anyone, really.
IT's bigger then that. Human behavior is evolved to a social paradigm. With that certain expectation have become intrinsic to human interaction.
Not the internet has made it easy for a few jackasses to violate those rules of behavior in a massive and automated way.
This means people need to learn to ignore and change certain expectation. Not something that comes easy.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Companies should simply block social networking sites or have policies against there use. In my office the average user spends 135% of there work hours logged into facebook 135%?! most of them leave it logged in when they go home
"Oooh! A talking moose wants my credit card number. That seems fair!"
The most dangerous tool is the one sitting in the chair.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
How do you get infected with malware from youtube?
You can't take the sky from me...
Sadly, slashdot remains last on both the list of sites from which to contract malware infections and the list of sites on which to meet people from which to contract an STD.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Okay, I'm no troll, but this is news to me. How does this happen? You all run antivirus software, and yet somehow actually *visiting* a site can infect you. So how does this work? Can you visit a site wearing a 'condom', or do you know, somehow, that you shouldn't click on something.
No trolling, but as a Mac user I click what I like. How do you know what to click or not click?
To summarize: Alarmist e-zine for PHB's confirms their suspicions that Facebook and YouTube are, in fact, the devil. Why is this on Slashd...oh, it's samzenpus. Never mind...
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Once again we have another poll which is somehow supposed to represent actual facts.
This is a "study" by a company that sells computer security "solutions" to small and medium-sized businesses. Haven't we all learned by now that these reports are largely designed to scare PHBs into buying the products and services these companies peddle? There's absolutely nothing in TFA that enables us to determine how the firms were chosen, who was interviewed, how they were selected, and whether they have even a clue about how sites like Facebook and YouTube might be the culprits.
Enough breathless reporting of stupid press releases, Slashdot editors. Just because SecurityWeek has no editorial scruples doesn't mean you shouldn't have them.
Do I have the impression you propose that people use one OS for their daily work and another OS for Facebook and the like? :)
Now I might be considered a troll, but why oh why does the average Linux person (see, I can generalize as well!) always try to fix the tool but NOT the user?
Irony apart, the issue with getting "infected" doesn't get solved by switching the Operating System. It might get partially solved or it might help somehow, but it's not a solution. There's no permanent solution, there's just common sense and its lack thereof.
I am a Windows user. I don't get infected with malware. Last time there was a virus on my machine, it came via a "brand new" external hard drive which apparently was used by the company that sold it to me. The antivirus yelled when I opened the folder containing the infected files (my intention was to delete everything in there). Last time my machine was infected by anything else... well, there isn't one.
It's all about being informed and having some common sense. People who don't have the former will still be okay, but they need extra care in checking what they're about to click on. People who don't have the latter... they will likely get infected. Those who don't have either... why on Earth would you assume they would know how to use Linux? Come on
Saying Windows is dangerous is like saying a gun is dangerous. A gun ain't dangerous, not unless some moron holds it. Only then things begin to become interesting. Is Windows prone to being infected? Certainly! Is this mainly generated by dumb people who click stupid links? Oh yeah!
Repeat after me: NOT the tool, but the person. NOT the tool, but the person. NOT the tool...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
"I am truely flabbergasted by this resistance to change. If you stand to lose ${many} by allowing Windows on the 'net... why not prevent that loss"
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.
I don't respond to AC's.
To be fair IE8 on Windows 7 with MS Security Essentials (all free with Win7 license) is actually a decently secure solution assuming it is set up that way from day one.
Why would I repeat something which is false? Repeating it does not make it true.
If you want the truth and nothing but the truth you should realise that it is a combination of the tools used and the people who get to use them. If you still have any doubt about which of these tools is more susceptible to malware, well... good luck to you.
About those people... what, in your opinion, is easier to change: habits, or tools? If you say 'habits'... good luck to you again.
--frank[at]unternet.org
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.
#DeleteChrome
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Also dangerous in that your HR staff are mucking about on facebook all day instead of working using the excuse that they are getting background information on potential staff. That's a horrible excuse because hiring or firing decisions should not be made on the basis of the trivia that ends up on facebook pages. You get idiots hired because they look good in a photo or have the same hobby as the HR person. Within the normal bounds of mental health and with competant management personality should be irrelevant to most jobs anyway. Profiling beyond competance for the job is almost a complete waste of time.
We take things like facebook too seriously. Nobody in the workplace should care about a teachers "drunken pirate" costume party photo for example, let alone the teacher losing their job over it.