Employers warned over social network use at work

Employers who allow their staff to use social network sites Facebook and Twitter at work have been warned by a security software firm that cybercriminals are targeting social network sites Facebook and Twitter because of their large user bases.

Social network sites have been victim to spam attacks, according to a report published last week by M86, due to the prevalent use of shortened URLs.

Rik Ferguson, senior security advisor at Trend Micro, said: "You can look at something like Facebook with hundreds of millions of users, Twitter with tens of millions, LinkedIn with tens of millions, MySpace I think is hundreds of millions – there are lots of potential targets out there so it''s very attractive.

"Social networks are based on trust – you believe that you know the person you''re interacting with and so, if somebody within your circle of trust admits someone who shouldn''t be there, that whole circle is broken for everyone."

The Office of Fair Trading recently released researched that showed 73 per cent of adults have a received a scam email in the past year. Back