Web2.0 Endangers Corporate Secuirty...

October 2007


With the Web becoming central to the way companies do business, cybercriminals are taking increasing advantage of Web 2.0 and social networking sites to launch attacks, said an International Data Corporation analyst at Kaspersky Lab Inc.’s Surviving CyberCrime conference in Waltham, Massachusetts on Tuesday. With the increased blending of people’s private lives with their corporate lives, employees’ personal lives become intermingled with the interactions they have at work with customers, fellow employees, partners and suppliers, he said. “So that creates a perforated perimeter where there isn’t a hard, fast separation between the corporate world and the personal world,” he said. The problem is that employees do not always follow their companies’ security policies – probably because they do not know what those policies are, just as they do not know what their companies’ acceptable use policies are. The latest threats to network security are now coming from collaborative and Web 2.0 environments, he said, where employees casually click on links that could lead them to malware. And they are coming from the wide variety of devices that may be accessing private as well as corporate networks, he said. “We’re seeing a change in the threat environment,” he said. “Instead of malicious code being distributed as e-mail attachments, we’re seeing more and more that they’re being embedded in Web 2.0 links.”