Risk Management and Compliance» social media

Building a Social Media Policy

admin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 02:53:19 +0000

: Image by ivanpw via Flickr

Social Media Policy

Social Media has become part of the user community several years ago. Today we have social media in the corporate environment. The main problem we have is how social media has evolved. It has been a bottom up approach. By bottom up I mean that the consumer has determined how to use a technology and the corporation is playing catch up. But the social norms that are appropriate for a consumer “product” are not appropriate in a corporate environment.

Social media usage is being retrofitted into the corporate environment. But the consumer is already used to using social media in an insecure, “information must be free” manner. Employees who have been used to giving up all their information in places such as Facebook and Twitter must now be retrained to use social media in a whole different manner to meet corporate standards. (Assuming we have a corporate standard for social media security)

But what is a corporate standard for using social media in an appropriate fashion that does not put the company at risk? Corporations have not made a concerted effort to define that secure social media strategy, or even a strategy for training their employees in the “correct” use of social media.

Social Media Policy Infrastructure

What is a good starting point for implementing a social media policy? Here is a basic guideline.

1) Define a policy – You cannot assume employees will do the right thing without guidance. You already have things like Expense Policies, Acceptable Use Policies, Internet Use Policies. Write a basic guideline. What’s in that guideline will vary from company to company.

2) Information Classification – You have to explicitly define what information can be shared and what information should not be Tweeted, FaceBooked, BlibbedBlabbaded (I made that up)about. If your employees do not know how valuable information is that you cannot blame them for inadvertently being sucked into the blogosphere. (I am not sure blogosphere is yet a word, but who cares)3) Keep It professional – If you allow your employees to Socialize (that a word with any meaning here?) information about your company, you have to give them standards to follow. Things like cursing, grammar mistakes, casual conversation style discussions might not be the image you want to portray when discussing anything related to your company.

4) Tracking and Monitoring – If you are going to have a policy for anything, you have to have a mechanism for tracking compliance, reporting on activity and have consequences for breaking that policy. How much tweets that are over the line makes you bring an employee before HR? What is a firing Facebook picture offense?

This is a very abbreviated start. In later posts I will define more aspects of a social media policy. But let’s get the conversation started about the necessity for this as a standard policy in every organization, both large and small.

HOW TO: Pick the Right Social Media Engagement Style (mashable.com)
Social Media Strategy Lessons From Pepsi (businessinsider.com)
Social Media Costs UK Economy $22 Billion a Year (penn-olson.com)

Corporate Reputation Management: Can a company require you register your Social Media Profile with Human Resources?

admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 02:43:05 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

When you join a company, you relinquish certain rights. The workplace is not a democracy. Yet many people still think that their corporate email, their corporate computers and the data they use is “theirs”. Who owns that data? Well the answer is the company. Companies are concerned with data loss prevention. A company can fire you for mis-using company data, that is obvious. A company can fire you for portraying a poor image such as drunkenness, poor behaviour, saying negative or derogative things about your boss or company, public displays of nudity, well I could go on about why you can be fired.

One example is a young woman who got fired from her job because she said she ” thought her job was boring. So she said so on her Facebook page. Her employer, Ivell Marketing and Logistics of Clacton, U.K., gave her this update: “Following your comments made on Facebook about your job and the company we feel it is better that, as you are not happy and do not enjoy your work we end your employment with Ivell Marketing & Logistics with immediate effect” as stated in this CNET article, http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10172931-71.html

So the question is, can a company can fire you for your out of office activities, should they have the right to monitor your activity? Should an employee be required to register all their social media profiles with their employer so that the reputation of the company can me monitored? It would obviously make it easier to know if an employee is damaging the reputation of the company.

The biggest challenge Social Media plays for a company is damage to reputation. A silly yet powerful example of Social Media affecting a company’s reputation is United Airlines breaking a musician’s guitar and refusing to pay for it. The musician Dave Carroll had a YouTube hit with his song about the poor airline response to him (http://www.boston.com/travel/blog/2009/07/song_over_guita.html) This viral video caused reputation damage. So this is a bit different from an employee posting something, but it has the same end result, reputation damage.

So when you start a new job, you have to take a drug test, get a background check, so why not register all your social media profiles? What are the pros and cons? Is it to much “Big Brother” or is it becoming a relevant reality of doing business in the Social Media age?

Gary Bahadur

CEO KRAA Security, baha@kraasecurity.com

http://www.kraasecurity.com

http://twitter.com/kraasecurity

*Managed Security Services

*Vulnerability Management

*Compliance & Policy Development

*PGP Security

*FREE Website Security Test

How Social Media Can Revolutionalise Your HR Department (gautamblogs.com)
Social Media In, Common Sense Out (socialmediatoday.com)
Managing Both Objections and Reputation Through Social Media (debbieweil.com)

What is Social Media INSecurity?

admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:30:54 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

The trends in Social Media are heading towards more sharing of information. But sharing of information has moved beyond your circle of friends and family. Social media is becoming less social and more… well more corporate. Or more like many people shouting in a bar, you are all in close proximity, but you can’t distinguish the individual conversations, you can’t make out who people really are or who is a potential quality relationship.

How many random friend requests do you get now from Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. Twitter is a bit different obviously, but that’s a whole other story. Now you are also getting bombarded with corporate Fanpages, groups and other means of luring you to their sites, brands and social following. This is the erosion of your true social circle.Social Media Security is really more about Insecurity. The distribution of your information across multiple platforms used to be in a restricted circle. This can be true data loss. Now its pretty much everywhere. You can find a person’s LinkedIn profile with a generic Google search. This should be restricted to the LinkedIn environment, but it’s not.With the advent of location based services, we will see physical insecurity based on social media usage. A recently popular site Please Rob Me http://pleaserobme.com has already begun taking advantage of the Twitter location feature. Imagine what can be done by a stalker following someone on twitter or a deranged Ex-boyfriend following you based on the events you are attending on Facebook? It’s easy to see how you can give away all your personal information without event thinking of it. Trends towards making information available will lead to Insecurity. Insecurity will lead to data breaches and compromise. Compromise will lead to lots of crying, money lost, probably lawsuits and other painful results. How do we get past this Social Media Insecurity?

Gary Bahadur

http://www.kraasecurity.com

http://blog.kraasecurity.com

http://twitter.com/kraasecurity

Address: 200 Se 1st St #601 Miami FL 33131

*Managed Security Services

*Vulnerability Management

*Compliance & Policy Development

*PGP Security

*FREE Website Security Test

The Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media (markevanstech.com)
The Age of Social Networks (briansolis.com)
Facebook Roundup: FTC, Design Changes, Nestlé, URLs and More (insidefacebook.com)
Cloud Computing Elasticity Drives Social Media (web2.sys-con.com)
Use Google Analytics to Track Inbound Links from Social Media Profiles (thecustomercollective.com)
13 Essential Social Media Lessons for B2B Marketers from the Masters (mashable.com)
Social Media Engagement Starts with Monitoring (bettercloser.com)

Can you protect yourself on Social Media?

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 02:44:56 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

One of the greatest challenges to privacy and security in the next several years is Social Networks and Social Media. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and others can be the downfall of valuing information. The ability to share and provide information is completely the opposite of network security requirements. This is really encouraging people to do things that are not security conscious activities. Social media encourages:

Lack of privacy
Encouraging information sharing
Giving away answers to security questions
Social engineering

As we have seen recently, a lot of spam, spyware and malware is attacking social network. Just in the past week I have probably recieved a 100 requests to be my friend on Facebook from people who I do not know and funny enough, all the message have the exact same personal message. Malicious people are attracted to social networks because of the ease of gaining trust and availability of data for social engineering. Relationship building is easier through social media which can easily lead to phishing attacks.

With these sites, people install applications without knowing what goes on in the background, and its easy to download malicious code to your computer. There are no external third party audits of these applications before the make it to your Facebook application. Your computer can be easily infected by a virus or spyware.

What does the Social Media user to protect their information?
No Personal information – This is anti-social network, but there are things you can limit about what you post. Don’t post your Birthday! Or your address or your mothers middle name or any really personal data.

Limit who can view and contact you – Don’t let your profile be truly public, restrict to people you know for requested users. Remember you can’t retract information you put out there.

Don’t trust strangers – Your mother was right, don’t open the door to strangers. Limit who you accept chat or friend requests from and well as even communicate with.

Trust no Profile – People lie, it’s sad but true. So profiles lie, they might say they went to your college or high school. They might be interested in your groups, so don’t take anyone at their word.

Restrict your privacy – There are some configuration setting in all the social media applications that can allow you to turn on some restrictions on your privacy. Take a minute to actually look at them. One easy example is in Facebook you can create groups that you can place friend in; you don’t want business people seeing what your friends are posting.

Password management – An oldie but a goodie, always use a strong password and don’t share it. And change it periodically.

Layers of protection – You should be running a personal firewall and antivirus software on the machine you are viewing social networks. This will help if a malicious piece of software tries to download something to your machine. Keep your protection software up to date as well and run the patch management software on your machine, this is especially important for you Windows users.

Child protection software – You should have some kind of child protection software running on machines where children under 13 are using. This will help with all that shady software that is out there.

Gary Bahadur

http://www.kraasecurity.com

http://blog.kraasecurity.com

http://twitter.com/kraasecurity

Address: 200 Se 1st St #601 Miami FL 33131

*Managed Security Services

*Vulnerability Management

*Compliance & Policy Development

*PGP Security

*FREE Website Security Test