| By Web 2.0 News Desk |
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| January 21, 2008 10:45 AM EST |
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The recent popularity of social networking sites such as
Facebook, MySpace and Bebo are costing UK corporations close to £6.5
billion annually in lost productivity, according to a poll conducted by
Information security consultancy - Global Secure Systems (GSS) and Infosecurity
Europe 2008 www.infosec.co.uk.
The poll was carried out amongst 776 office workers, who
admitted to spending at least 30 minutes a day visiting social networking sites
whilst at work, that’s a minimum of 10 hours a month which equates to 3 weeks
of every year with two respondents who were so hooked that the spend 3 hours
visiting these sites everyday! The end result is potentially billions of
pounds in lost productivity maintain GSS, plus the extra demand on bandwidth
which is an additional cost to a business in terms of efficiency, maintenance
and resources.
In a recent meeting held by Infosecurity Europe 2008 with 20
CISOs one of their biggest IT concerns for 2008 was how to manage social
networking sites at work, with many estimating that between 15% and 20% of
their current bandwidth is being taken up with social networking sites and for
many the best move forward is to ban these sites altogether.
Claire Sellick – Infosecurity Europe Event Director said “It
would appear that most CISO and IT Directors loathe social networking sites and
if they had their way would ban them completely, but what is also coming across
loud and clear is that the HR departments actually welcome the use of these
sites – so there is a lot of internal pushing and shoving going on between HR
and IT over how best to manage these sites.”
One FTSE100 CISO reported that they now block Facebook as it
was consuming 30% of their bandwidth and they are looking to block both MySpace
and e-bay as they consume 10% and 5% of the corporate Internet browsing
bandwidth.
According to recent research by Computerweekly.com 63% of
businesses are planning to monitor or limit staff access to these sites and 17%
plan to ban access at work completely over the next 6 months.
David Hobson MD of GSS said “Social networking sites are now
integral to the way that many of the latest and youngest recruits into the
workforce communicate and work, so for some sectors social networking sites may
have a part to play in terms of competitive advantage or used for research or
as a marketing tool. It comes down to a fine balancing act – and mostly a
case of introducing a “reasonable use” policy.”
“However, what is apparent are the serious security
implications associated with social networking, where hackers, exploiters and
extortionists are worming their way into these sites extracting all sorts of
information on the members – our advice as always to anyone using these sites
is to give as little personal information away as possible.” said Hobson.
GSS claims to have saved thousands of pounds a year by
practicing what they preach by limiting access to Facebook and other social
networking sites on its company network with Internet filtering software.
"Our Internet bandwidth requirements recently came up
for review and it was suggested we would need an upgrade, costing a few
thousand pounds more a year," said David Hobson, managing director of GSS.
"After analysing the traffic patterns, however, we
realised that around 25 per cent of our Web usage was for social networking
sites such as Facebook. After locking down this traffic and just allowing staff
to view these sites during their lunch hour or after work, we found we didn't
actually need to upgrade our bandwidth after all and have saved a considerable
amount in the upgrade costs!" he added.
At Infosecurity Europe 2008 the subject of security and how
to manage social networking vulnerabilities will be covered in a number of
seminars and there is a keynote panel with Giles Hogben, ENISA, David Lacey,
Member of the BCS Security Forum Strategic Panel and Martyn Croft, Head of
Corporate Systems, The Salvation Army.
“Organisations have a very long way to go in getting to
grips with the risks presented by social networking. Lost productivity is the
tip of the iceberg. The threat of social engineering to hijack sensitive
information is real and growing. And current acceptable use policies are far
from acceptable: they are poorly written, maintained, communicated and enforced.
There are also some big, political issues that have to be addressed such as how
far to police or trust staff, and how to maintain thought leadership across
highly networked groups of staff.” Said David Lacey, Member of the BCS Security
Forum Strategic Panel.
"The Salvation Army, as a Christian church and charity,
has a mission to spread the Christian message and to reach out to those in need
- and we'll employ any tools we can to achieve that aim, whether we're working
in the community or even in cyberspace. Social networking sites can be a
great tool for reaching out to people, but they can easily consume vast amount
of precious resources like staff time and network bandwidth and we need to
ensure that all our resources are used wisely and effectively. We try to
achieve an appropriate balance and have to ensure that our essential services
are not compromised either by overuse of social networking sites, or by new
vulnerabilities exposed through these websites."
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