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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.
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.
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
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.