SMBs Weigh Security Risks of Facebook, Social Networking

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These days, small organizations with limited marketing dollars are faced with increasing pressure to open up their doors and enable access to sites such as Facebook, Twitter and other social networking tools.

But with the increased publicity and access come untold privacy, productivity and security challenges. And while organizations in all market segments suffer, the cash-strapped, resource-bereft SMB usually gets hit the hardest when incidents arise.

A Symantec “2011 Social Media Protection Flash Poll” found that the typical organization experienced nine social media incidents — such as an employee posting confidential information on his or her profile. Of all the surveyed organizations, 94 percent suffered negative consequences, including damage to their reputation, loss of customer trust, data loss and lost revenue.

Meanwhile, social media incidents have cost the average company $4 million over the past 12 months, according to the study. While many larger organizations could swallow those costs, a price tag in the millions could be devastating to a small- or medium-size business, with the worst-case scenario that includes shuttering operations completely.

As such, social media has lately become the conversation du jour with their SMB customers, many solution providers say. And hands down privacy concerns top the list of SMB challenges. The free marketing and publicity allowed by Facebook and Twitter often networks serves to backfire when ill-informed employees slander the organization or disclose damaging information online.

“You get customers where half their staff is tweeting or putting out posts of stupid stuff during the course of the day, and someone who is a friend of a friend finds it,” said Carl Mazzanti, vice president of eMazzanti Technologies, a Hoboken, N.J.-based solution provider. “Your most private conversation is now the conversation of everyone. You can’t retract it—it’s done.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Symantec study found that the top three social media incidents all revolve around privacy concerns, with 46 percent experiencing employees haring too much information in public forum, 41 percent suffering loss of exposure of confidential information, and 37 percent increasing their exposure to litigation.

Those privacy issues could include anything from disparaging the company in a Facebook rant and unintentionally revealing embarrassing personal information, to deliberately disclosing confidential company information that could damage the company’s reputation or arm its competition.

“For example, if someone posts ‘My work sucks, I can’t wait to get out of here!” on their status, other people who know that person will immediately identify that company as not a pleasant place to be,” said Richard Hyde, , sales director for Whitehall, Penn.-based EZMicro. “Worse yet, they may be a mutual friend with the owner of that company—talk about raising some eyebrows on employee morale!”

Meanwhile, productivity is another challenge facing the SMB, channel partners say.

Last year, workplace inefficiencies were listed as number one, followed by malware, data loss and viruses as the four top threats caused by insecure Web 2.0 applications, according to a June 2010 Ponemon Institute study titled “Web 2.0 Security In The Workplace.”

And partners maintain that productivity issues are still top of mind. While larger enterprises can sometimes overlook lost productivity costs, SMBs often feel the sting of lost work time even when one of their members fails to pull their weight, simply due to the fact that employees generally have bigger overall responsibilities and are often required to perform multiple job functions, solution providers say.

“Productivity is the main concern,” Hyde said. “Too many people get sucked into the lure of always keeping up with what’s going on.”

In addition, SMBs that enable Facebook and Twitter for part or all of the day are opening themselves up to a maelstrom of malware and phishing attacks, delivered via Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

NEXT: Social Media Malware

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