The two faces of Facebook.....

On the one face, Facebook is a bright shiny object, for each of us, it enables us to connect with old friends, share experiences, talk about our lives and make new friends. For businesses, Facebook with over 350 million users and a 50% usage rate of all Social Networking sites (Myspace 15%, Youtube 15%, Twitter 1.1%) it's no wonder businesses want to be presenting their brand on their own Facebook fanpage and rightly so. If you are a business and not on Facebook, you are missing an opportunity.

On the other face, Facebook is an accident waiting to happen. The number of phishing scams that have proliferated within Facebook in the last year is staggering, the most well known being the Kneber botnet. Hackers have been able to steal user passwords without users being logged in and send messages to a users friend list, the friend is trusting and clicks on a video, ad or link and is immediately infected. If this is done at home, it's personal time, if it's done at work, it's business time. From professional experience, I have cleaned up at least 5 cases in the last 3 months. So what does a business do?

1)Block Facebook from users and only allow staff who are working on the companies Facebook Fanpage to access Facebook. Same with Twitter, MySpace, etc. Granted you will have some disgruntled employees, but at least they are still working versus infected and not.

2)Provide knowledge to employees about how to secure their Facebook profile and what to watch for. If users access the company network from home and their home computer becomes infected, that is another way into the company network.

Here is a good article for taking advantage of Facebook Privacy settings, and if you do get infected, Combofix is the best tool I have found to clean your system, here is a link to my blogpost Spyware encounters of the worst kind .

Don't get me wrong, Facebook is useful, but there are always two sides to any story or in this case two faces and as with anything, being more educated about a subject helps you make a better informed decision.... Read more ...