Shining a Spotlight on Social Media Risks

• More users are practicing certain safe behaviors, including blocking their profiles from being visible through public search engines (up 37% over last year).

• More than 25% have never changed their default privacy settings.

• More than 75% place no restrictions on who can see their recent activity.

Facebook membership grew to more than 400 million active users, a 229 percent jump over the previous year.

Twitter reported a 1,500 percent growth in the number of new registered users in the course of a year.

Webroot has seen a rise in spam on social networks, which commonly contains links to malicious Web site links: The Webroot survey showed a 23 percent increase in spam received on social networks since last year.

For example, it noted over 100 different variations of Koobface, a worm known to trick people into clicking links they shouldn't in order to infect their PC's and often convince them to provide credit card numbers to buy phony antivirus products, among other fraudulent activities.

• 61% include their birthday

• 52% include their hometown

• 17% make their cell phone available

• 77% don't restrict access to their photo albums

• 81% don't place any restrictions on who can see their recent activity

• 28% have never changed their default privacy settings

• 73% were aware of Facebook's December 2009 privacy changes which automatically exposed their full profiles by default

• 42% haven't made changes to their settings since the switch

The Application Usage and Risk Report (http://www.paloaltonetworks.com/researchcenter/) from Palo Alto Networks shows that barriers to accessing applications are at an all-time low, accelerating the adoption of applications regardless of geography or vertical industry.

While financial services and healthcare workers increasingly rely on social media for business collaboration, they often ignore the associated risks such as non-compliance, data loss and threat propagation.

94 percent of the healthcare and financial services organizations use an average of 28 social networking applications, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

• Of the 41 different email applications found, 26 browser-based variants were detected, consuming 220 GB and 152 GB respectively

• 750 applications tracked can pass as Web traffic by hopping ports, using port 80, or hiding within SSL

• Use of browser-based file sharing applications consumes 399GB of bandwidth in financial services organizations, and 143GB in healthcare firms

• The one-to-one delivery nature of these applications does not prevent the purposeful movement of confidential data unless strict policy controls are in place

• The bandwidth consumed by social networking applications doubled in the last 18 months to 9GB per organization

• Update privacy settings on your profile to restrict or omit access to any personal data

• Take advantage of any enhanced security features

• Only accept friend requests, emails and site links from people you know

• Protect the password

• Protect your PC with an Internet security suite that includes antivirus, antispyware, and firewall technologies

• Always automate software updates

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