Social Networking Risks in Enterprise Networking Exploding
Firewall Vendor Palo Alto Networks, in a study, said on Thursday that social networking and digitally-based collaborations are now consuming large chunks of enterprise networks.
With the growth of social networking, the risks involved in using such platforms also followed suit.
Based on the study, the use of popular social networking websites has significantly increased in the past six month with Twitter leading at 250 percent growth and Facebook trailing behind with 192 percent increase.
Also, Facebook Chat took the fourth spot in the most common chat application found in the enterprise networks. Since its launching in April 2008, it has overtaken Yahoo Messenger and AIM.
Meanwhile, blogging and editing in Wikipedia has also increased their share with 39 percent growth. This led to the consumption of bandwidth increasing by 48 percent.
The survey was conducted to more than 200 organizations around the world, including those in the sectors of manufacturing, health care, government, retail, education, and financial service.
Palo Alto said that the survey is almost a hundred percent reliable since the data gathered were not from evaluation sheets answered by the respondents but from the actual network traffic assessment of the users. The study was conducted from March to September this year.
Palo Also warned that the growth of applications may one day affect the organizations’ networks, specially that new forms of risks almost always tag along new forms of applications.
Meanwhile, the research group pointed out that out of 255 Enterprise applications, around 70 percent has the capability to transfer files while 64 percent are identified to have vulnerable spots. On the other hand, 28 percent of the applications are identified to be virus-carrying or malware affected and more than 16 percent are capable of tunneling on other applications.
These malwares, which usually run in applications and hijack users’ personal accounts, include Koobface, Boface, and Fbaction.
The research firm had now advices employees and business managers to regularly check their networks to avoid future problems caused by the malwares.
Related posts:
