Outside of the financial services
industry, very few companies actually monitor what their employees say on
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any of the 1,000+ other social media sites
around the world. Few companies scan
short URLs for potential links to malware sites. Few have deployed systems to protect against
spam delivered via social media. Few
have deployed systems to capture whatever business records or other important
content might be posted to social media sites.
In a way, social media use in the vast
majority of organizations is like email was back around 1997 – not much in the
way of anti-spam, anti-malware, content filtering or archiving is in place to
protect organizations from all sorts of harm.
Use social media today and – at least from the perspective of how
protected you’ll be against spam and malware – you can recreate your email
experience from yesteryear.
Should you be concerned about? Yes:
·
Facebook says that about 4% of its
content is spam and Twitter said that 1.5% of its tweets were spam-like in 2010
(numbers not dissimilar to email spam figures back in the mid- to late 1990s). However, Imperium estimates that 400 million
Facebook are victims of social spam each day.
·
Last week, malware stole login credentials for 45,000 Facebook
accounts – a small proportion of the approximately 800 million accounts in use
today – but 45,000 nonetheless.
·
Imperium estimates that 40% of the social profiles in existence
today are frauds.
·
Our own research indicates that only a small proportion of
organizations are archiving their social media content, despite the fact that
some of this content is potentially actionable or might be subject to legal or
regulatory scrutiny at some point.
Clearly, there is a problem: lots of malware and spam floating
around, millions of tweets and posts that probably should be archived, and few
companies doing anything about it.
We are in the process of writing a white paper that addresses
these topics, and will be launching a major study within the week on how social
media is used and perceived, and what organizations are doing to protect
themselves. Let us know if you’re
interested in what we will be finding from the research.
OR
Commentary for Messaging Wire
Week of January 16, 2012