Social Networking's Security Pitfalls

The phenomenon of social networking is no surprise for any IT administrator who's seen their users use Facebook, MySpace or even LinkedIn. These sites have grown at phenomenal rates, as has the number of attacks on users who use these sites. The article linked above discusses one example of a recent security attack (the Koobface worm) on users who watched a video sent to them on a social networking site.

This security attack is a good reminder as to why we have corporate or enterprise proxies installed at the network edge. The proxy is the first line of defense block websites that have malware, viruses and worms on them. If you're just running a proxy, without running any content filtering (anti-virus, anti-malware, URL filtering), then you've only got half a solution implemented. A good proxy solution would have prevented Koobface from infecting your network.