Visiting social networks from an office result in data breaches. What to do?

A recent research conducted by the Secure Enterprise 2.0 Forum, an industry group aimed at enabling the safe use of social media in the workplace and sponsored by WorkLight, made a conclusion that now hackers are inclined to use social networks like Facebook and Twitter to spread their malware across company networks and workstations. As more workers spend their time communicating with each other and their friends via social networking sites the latter seem to be more efficient way for cybercrooks to breach information and steal identities for further attacks.

Attentions of hackers shifted from email to mediums like Facebook and Twitter partly because an increasing number of people spend a great portion of their time on those websites and besides the e-mail environment has reached a level of maturity that makes the new frontier of social networks more attractive to hackers and spammers, according to David Lavenda, a vice president at WorkLight.

"E-mail is in a steady state," Lavenda says. "It's an electronic warfare game with spammers, filters and security tools, and it's reached some sort of status quo. With the new [social] tools, as people come online and get more involved with them, there is an opportunity to cause harm."

These hacks implicate very serious losses and harms. The report shows that about 30% of such cyber attacks lead to the leakage of sensitive information. Nearly 13% resulted in actual monetary loss, while more than 10% installed malware on computers or their corresponding networks.

While most CIOs decided to solve this problem by banning social networks in the workplace Lavenda's company, WorkLight, offers enterprises a server that allows them to move company information over consumer portals like Facebook and iGoogle without it living on the servers of those sites. WorkLight claims that it allows your employees to stay (safely) on their favorite consumer sites to connect with each other and customers and partners.

"Forbid it or not, most CIOs know users will find a way to use these tools anyway," he says. "Even if they don't buy our product, this report moves the market forward because they know what the threats are and can see about addressing them. Once you know what the threats are, then you can go about mitigating them."