Web 2.0 Security: What Me Worry?

Worried about Web 2.0 security? If so, you may be all by yourself, at least according to a recent survey by security firm Clearswift. What Clearswift found is that many organizations don't have a clue about what many of their employees are doing online, and way too many don't have adequate security policies in place.

For the most part, the survey focused on Web 2.0 social media sites -- blogs, forums, Web mail, instant messaging, social networking sites, podcasts, online video sites, wikis, photo sharing sites and Second Life -- and employee's use of them during in the work environment. More specifically, Clearswift's research, which was conducted online earlier this year with total sample size of 939 adults, found that:

• 34 percent of organizations don’t monitor employees’ use of the Internet.
• 51 percent of businesses don't know whether they've lost confidential information via social media outlets.
• 20 percent of IT and business decision-makers don't have a policy governing appropriate use of the internet, including social media sites.
• 20 percent of organizations do not allow blogging at work while 45 percent don't have a policy on it.
• 39 percent of IT and business decision-makers consider social media to be relevant to today's corporate environment, while 36 percent do not see social media as relevant to their businesses.
• 13 percent of organizations are not aware of social media and have no policy on it.

While most organizations do understand that 71 percent of their staff use Web mail, 62 percent use forums, and 56 percent use blogs, 36 percent of those surveyed do not see them as relevant to their business and have no plans on using them in the future.

While more than 73 percent of those surveyed felt that loss of confidential data was the number one security issue in terms of priority to the security of their organization, 51 percent are not aware if their company has ever lost confidential information through social media sites. The only security issue to rank higher than loss of confidential data was viruses/worms (77 percent), yet 96 percent of companies are already using anti-virus tools.

In addition to virus, worms, and losing confidential data, other security issues that survey responders consider "high importance" are spyware (54 percent) and pornography in the workplace (54 percent). At the bottom of the list of security issues in terms of priority were those related to social media, including security breaches via blogs and security breaches via forums, which were tied for last, edging out "employee time wasting" and security breaches via instant messaging, and security breaches via Web mail.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 05:05 PM  Permalink