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ISACA Names Top Five Social Media Risks for Business

Companies around the world are increasingly using social media for business marketing, support, and collaboration but also exposing themselves to risks such as non-compliance, data loss and legal issues.

Companies around the world are increasingly using social media for business marketing, support, and collaboration but also exposing themselves to risks such as non-compliance, data loss and legal issues.

ISACA today in a complimentary white paper titled “Social Media: Business Benefits With Security, Governance and Assurance Perspectives,” named the top five social media risks for business and recommended solutions to help businesses address security, customer service and corporate reputation risks raised by their employees’ use of social media.

“Social media is built on the assumption of a network of trusted friends and colleagues, which is exploited by social engineering at great cost. That is why ongoing education is critical.”

ISACA, a global association for enterprise governance of information technology with over 86,00 members, urges organizations to actively address the following potential risks:

• Viruses/malware

• Brand hijacking

• Lack of control over content

• Unrealistic customer expectations of “Internet-speed” service

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• Non-compliance with record management regulations

Developed by a team of global ISACA experts, the white paper goes beyond the traditional look at social media in the workplace to address employees’ use of social media outside of work. It also provides detailed how-to tips for effective social media governance.

“Historically, organizations tried to control risk by denying access to cyberspace, but that won’t work with social media,” said Robert Stroud, CGEIT, international vice president of ISACA and vice president of IT service management and governance for the service management business unit at CA Technologies. “Companies should embrace it, not block it. But they also need to empower their employees with knowledge to implement sound social media governance.”

Since tools like Facebook and Twitter don’t require support from the IT department, they can be introduced by a business unit, marketing team or individual employees, and bypass IT, HR and Legal. This issue is reflected in IT department attitudes—62% of respondents to the 2010 ISACA IT Risk/Reward Barometer rated the risk posed by employees visiting social networking sites or checking personal e-mail as medium or high.

According to a report published earlier this year by network security company, Palo Alto Networks, healthcare and financial services firms use an average of 28 social networking applications and p2p. The report showed that these heavily regulated industries are as “connected” as universities in terms of social networking and other Web 2.0 or “rogue” apps, and have little control over social networking applications and risks as such application usage continues to increase.

“The greatest risks posed by social media are all tied to violation of trust,” said ISACA Certification Committee member John Pironti, CISM, CRISC, and president of IP Architects LLC. “Social media is built on the assumption of a network of trusted friends and colleagues, which is exploited by social engineering at great cost. That is why ongoing education is critical.”

A free copy can be downloaded at www.isaca.org/research.

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Written By

For more than 15 years, Mike Lennon has been closely monitoring the threat landscape and analyzing trends in the National Security and enterprise cybersecurity space. In his role at SecurityWeek, he oversees the editorial direction of the publication and is founder and director of several leading cybersecurity industry conferences around the world.

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