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As soon as I heard about today’s Pew Internet Trust and American Life Project survey that says most people surf the Internet for no particular reason—I immediately thought of our recent research showing that the leisure, or fun side of the web can often be tainted. Searching for breaking trends and current news represented a higher risk (22.4 percent) than searching for objectionable content (21.8 percent). For example, while doing research for our threat report we found that searching for breaking trends and current news represented a higher risk (22.4 percent) than searching for objectionable content (21.8 percent).
Most people get into trouble when they are busy doing something that isn’t useful—internet use included. OK, so what does this mean for you at work? Well, if you didn’t know it already, your new workforce is on the internet A LOT, and they expect to have internet access.
So, you’ve got workers wandering the net and at every moment they are just two clicks away from malware. Makes you stop and think a bit about the security defenses you have in place within your organization, doesn’t it?
The study says, “internet users of all ages are much more likely now than in the past to say they go online for no particular reason other than to pass the time or have fun. Some 58 percent of all adults (or 74 percent of all online adults) say they use the internet this way.”
“Young adults’ use of the internet can at times be simply for the diversion it presents. Indeed, 81 percent of all young adults in this age cohort report they have used the internet for this reason at least occasionally.”
And it’s not just the youngest that are wandering the internet in their spare time (at their lunch, or on a slow Friday, or Monday). More than 65 percent of those 30-49 exhibit the same behavior.
You can’t stop internet access and keep happy employees, but you can keep your organization safe.
Keep up with the latest in threats and threat research at the Websense Security Labs blog.
Today, we have some exciting news. Some of you may have already heard about it, because it is big!
Starting today, we have implemented a partnership with Facebook, arguably the largest, most important platform on the globe, to better protect users against malicious links leading to malware-embedded websites and fraud.
A platform as popular as Facebook is naturally a target for attackers. We have been working with Facebook and their security teams for a number of years in order to keep their users safe, but now we have integrated directly into the platform for an unprecedented security combination.
Soon, when a user clicks on a URL that has been posted within Facebook, that link will be sent to Websense for security classification. The Websense® ThreatSeeker® Cloud, an advanced classification and malware identification platform, will then analyze the link in real time. If the destination site is considered unsafe, the user is presented with a warning page that offers the choice to continue at their own risk, return to the previous screen, or get more information on why it was flagged as suspicious.
In this way, we are helping Facebook continue their proactive fight to keep malicious links off of their platform and allow safe use for all of its members.
Read more
I've been meeting with a lot of customers recently, and two things that keep coming up are concerns about advanced targeted attacks and how to deal with the threats that social media bring into an organization.
Now, social media has been around for quite some time, it’s not new. The new challenge is the surprising rate at which it is evolving and the fact that it is seen now as a freight train that IT can’t stop—and shouldn’t try stopping.
Marketing uses Facebook and Twitter. HR uses LinkedIn. Even customer support is looking at Twitter. And a new generation of workers can’t seem to live without constantly being connected—and expectation they bring to work with them. I’ve even had a CSO come out and say, “Even in a tough job market, my CEO says we need to do everything we can to get the best candidates out there. That means access to social media and the innovations that come with it. Basically they told me to make it happen AND keep us safe.”
We’ve been working on things to keep organizations safe on the social Web for ages, but it helps to check in with the world every now and then to make sure we are on the right track in allowing safe access to social media.
With that in mind, we teamed with the Ponemon Institute to assess the social media readiness and risk profile of more than 4,000 IT and IT security practitioners around the globe, and what we found is a little surprising.
Recently more than 150 IT security professionals joined a panel of experts for our first-ever live interactive SpeakUp debate in London. The debate focused on social media, covering the legal and security issues as well as the psychology of falling for Internet scams. What struck me the most was the final audience poll: “From what you’ve heard today, would you do something differently?” More than half the audience replied yes.
Interestingly, 21% of the audience allow company-wide access to social media and don’t monitor employee content. Seemingly, around the same number (19%), have suffered a social media related security incident. Just over half (54%) have not had an incident and over a quarter (27%) answered ‘don’t know’.
It’s still a subject that confuses and divides security professionals, so we used Facebook to demonstrate just how prolific malicious applications are. Without the right protection in place, users could happily click on a link exposing your organization to malware. (read more)
The only constant in corporate security is change. Websense became famous as the best URL filtering company. We invented our ThreatSeeker Network and the world’s first Honey Grid, and as a result, we know the Web better than anyone else. Our customers saw Websense filtering as nice-to-have software that helped employees be productive and prohibited inappropriate use of a company’s Internet access.
But as our knowledge of the Web deepened, we were on the front lines as more attacks and security threats moved online. We quickly became the go-to experts on Web-based threats and our technology was so ingrained within the Web that we often were the first company to detect these threats. As we moved from filtering to Web security, we often protected our customers from Web threats before competitors were even aware that they existed.
