Canadian Security Connection

Ontario’s  privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian says that banning employees from visiting social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter at work isn’t a good idea.

“I think it’s a mistake,”Cavoukian said. She completely understands why in today’s environment some businesses may favour an outright ban, but says such prohibitions are almost always counterproductive.

What the commissioner has neglected to mention, is the fact that although a ‘blanket ban’ is not the solution, neither is unsecured open policy.  

To leverage the advantages that twitter, facebook and other social networking/user generated content sites  bring to your business, you have to allow access and mitigate the security risks associated with them.

I am a whole hearted advocate of saying ’yes’ to these Web 2.0 sites - as long as you have both a usage policy to educate your ‘users’  AND a security solution in place that can categorize pages on these sites in real time - thus giving you the ability to maximize the advantages, without compromising your security posture.

Read the story as reported on itbusiness.ca

Here is an excerpt from a post on Gartner’s Blog Network by Andrea DiMaio. Although he claims not be a security expert, Andrea provides some good insight on Web 2.0 risks  in light of the affect of the Twitter outage.

He touches on three key risks:

1. Malicious software that may be downloaded through sites
2. Unavailability of those sites when they are needed
3. Data posted on sites that may unwillingly reveal information that may negatively affect government operations

Click here to read his suggestions on how to address these risks.