In the new hit movie The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg plays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard student who will stop at nothing to create the first comprehensive, global online social network. Ironically, in the process of making 500 million “friends,” Zuckerberg loses those who are closest to him, sacrificing them to ambition, greed and runaway ego. The moral of the story? When it comes to social networking, know who your true friends really are — or risk paying a terrible price.
At Symantec, we recognize the growing power and utility of social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and others for both personal and business use. We also understand the risks associated with careless participation, and ask that all employees engage in best practices to enable us to sidestep fraud, identity theft, malware and computer viruses.
While some of the challenges that social media, networking and collaboration sites present are more complex, they are ultimately no different than any other communication channel in that we must always protect our sensitive data regardless of medium in which we are communicating.
“It doesn’t matter if you are tweeting, blogging, or posting status updates on Facebook. You must protect sensitive data in every medium in which you share information. Sensitive data includes source code*, employee personal identifying information (PII), customer data, and Symantec Internal Use Only and Highly Confidential data,” said Justin Somaini, Symantec’s chief information security officer, who recently participated in a social media webinar hosted by the Information Risk Executive Council (see sidebar for more details).
Several of the principal risks can be avoided if we all stay alert.
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