Social Media as Time Machine

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Outside of the financial services industry, very few companies actually monitor what their employees say on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any of the 1,000+ other social media sites around the world. Few companies scan short URLs for potential links to malware sites. Few have deployed systems to protect against spam delivered via social media. Few have deployed systems to capture whatever business records or other important content might be posted to social media sites.

In a way, social media use in the vast majority of organizations is like email was back around 1997—not much in the way of anti-spam, anti-malware, content filtering or archiving is in place to protect organizations from all sorts of harm. Use social media today and—at least from the perspective of how protected you’ll be against spam and malware—you can recreate your email experience from yesteryear.

Should you be concerned about?  Yes:

• Facebook says that about 4% of its content is spam and Twitter said that 1.5% of its tweets were spam-like in 2010 (numbers not dissimilar to email spam figures back in the mid- to late 1990s). However, Imperium estimates that 400 million Facebook are victims of social spam each day.
• Last week, malware stole login credentials for 45,000 Facebook accounts—a small proportion of the approximately 800 million accounts in use today—but 45,000 nonetheless.
• Imperium estimates that 40% of the social profiles in existence today are frauds.
• Our own research indicates that only a small proportion of organizations are archiving their social media content, despite the fact that some of this content is potentially actionable or might be subject to legal or regulatory scrutiny at some point.

Clearly, there is a problem: lots of malware and spam floating around, millions of tweets and posts that probably should be archived, and few companies doing anything about it.

We are in the process of writing a white paper that addresses these topics, and will be launching a major study within the week on how social media is used and perceived, and what organizations are doing to protect themselves. Let us know if you’re interested in what we will be finding from the research.