Facebook Privacy, Security Fears Grow with Social Network Risks: Via Security from eWeek.

According to Sophos, 60 percent of businesses consider Facebook the riskiest social networking site, underscoring a new level of wariness for social networks at a time when a researcher from Kaspersky Lab says compromised accounts for Twitter and other sites can go for big bucks in the cyber-underworld.

Businesses are growing more concerned about the use of social networks, starting with Facebook.

According to a survey of 502 IT professionals by Sophos, businesses are seeing more malware and spam, and 60 percent of respondents put Facebook ahead of MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn as the riskiest social networking site. The statistics, which were included in Sophos' "Security Threat Report: 2010" (PDF), revealed that while 33 percent block Facebook for productivity reasons, businesses are also concerned with the prospect of spam, malware and data leakage on social networks.

“Furthermore, over 72 percent of firms believe that employees’ behavior on social networking sites could endanger their business’s security,” according to the report. “This has increased from 66 percent in the previous study (in April). The number of businesses that were targets for spam, phishing and malware via social networking sites increased dramatically, with spam showing the sharpest rise from 33.4 percent in April to 57 percent in December. This highlights a surge in exploitation of such sites by spammers.”

While just 21 percent of the respondents in the April survey said they or their colleagues had received malware via a social networking site, that percentage increased to more than a third in December. When it comes to Facebook in particular, 45 percent of respondents said they do not control access to the site. However, Sophos Senior Technology Consultant Graham Cluley said seven percent did so due to fears of data leaks, while 11 percent controlled access because of malware concerns.

“There have been a variety of malware attacks via social networks - but Koobface is the Godfather,” Cluley said. “There have been many different versions of Koobface, and it has become steadily more sophisticated - attacking a wider variety of social networks and becoming much cleverer in the way that it operates.”

Read Original Article:(Via Security from eWeek.)