Social Networking Users Have Risky Behavior

Following my post yesterday about Social Networking in the Workplace I thought it made sense to follow it up with how most users of Social Networking engage in some pretty risky behavior. Webroot recently released some statistics around how risky users tend to be when interacting on social networking sites.

From their press release:

Surveying over 1,100 members of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and other popular social networks, Webroot uncovered numerous behaviors that put social networkers’ identities and wallets at risk. Among the highlights:

Two-thirds of respondents don’t restrict any details of their personal profile from being visible through a public search engine like Google;

Over half aren’t sure who can see their profile;

About one third include at least three pieces of personally identifiable information;

Over one third use the same password across multiple sites; and

One quarter accept “friend requests” from strangers

With statistics like these, if your organization allows access to social networking sites from the office, you'll want to make sure your end-users are protected with up to date URL filtering and malware scanning on your corporate proxy.