Experts to Prepare for Warding Off Web 2.0 Threats

According to a Forrester Research study titled, "Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008", 96% of the total 150 IT professionals interviewed said that they significantly value the adoption of Web 2.0 sites and other social networking sites. But less than 5% reported having adopted specific security elements to help the technology users to protect themselves.

The findings in the report say that majority of the observers believe that in spite of having security risks, companies shouldn't prevent employees from approaching social networking and other Web 2.0 sites, such as the genuine multimedia sites featuring file-sharing properties.

Therefore, even as sites for social networking like Facebook are working to develop a network application of its own, specifically for business users, a large number of security professionals maintain that business organizations and other types of enterprises can face serious risks from these sites.

According to researchers of computer security, the distributors of spam, malware, and adware use social networking sites to facilitate cyber criminals to wage highly targeted attacks by using information harvested from member profiles. Hence, social networking rapidly entails a painful issue, as reported by InfoWorld on February 21, 2008.

IT experts have pointed out one recent attack happened over MySpace. In the attack, a page of the Website was changed to appear as if a person visiting the URL of the site was forced to install a Window update that actually was a malware-infected program. Once the user clicks on the link, a malware program uploaded in the system.

In addition, security experts have perceived that they need to be ready to prevent the several other security threats. These threats are most likely to emerge by visiting these Websites, including spear phishing and malware assaults.

Expressing his opinion on the current Web 2.0 security, Paul Henry, Vice President of Technology Evangelism, Secure Computing, maker of network gateway, said that organizations need to customize their policies for Internet use and adjust their Web security rules for Web 2.0. Moreover, they have to create rules, which can encompass social sites and other kinds of Websites. But these usage policies must be specifically spelled out and strictly enforced, as reported by InfoWorld on February 21, 2008.

Related article: Experts Find Two Vulnerabilities in Firefox

» SPAMfighter News - 2/29/2008