Personal reputation management on social networks has been talked to death – just check Google. While there are plenty of reasons to be cautious about the personal information you post on social networks, Clark Howard sums it up well, there hasn’t been as much discussion about protecting your business assets.
Social networking has created a slew of security concerns for the folks back in IT who are charged with keeping your company’s network safe. The results of an attack originating from the social media realm can be disastrous, from a brand and reputation management point of view, to paralyzing network attacks and the stealing of institutional knowledge.
If you have the desire to dive into it, there is a very interesting blog from a company called Netragard on how hackers can penetrate IT Infrastructures using internet based social networking tools. It’s an interesting read, even though you if you’re like me, you might get lost a bit in the technical weeds. The firm uses a combination of old school recon and technical savvy to penetrate private social networking groups, mine technical data and with the information they gather, hack their way in to clients’ networks.
The general take away for those of us in the communication business is companies need to educate their employees about the dangers lurking in the social media realm, and how easy it is for professional hackers to mine personal and company information for use against you, your company and your IT infrastructure.
As my good friend and fellow pr man J.D. wrote on his crisis management blog on this very topic, “In the end, all individuals — company and non — must be reminded to only Tweet/post information that they’d say comfortably through a bullhorn on a street corner…in a not-so-safe part of town.”
Be careful out there.
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