Social Networking Can Be Dangerous

Employers and administrators are beginning to believe that social networking definitely has its drawback and influence on their employees, and it's not a good influence. Employees who spend time on places like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter do a lot of it during working hours and on company computers.

Two big concerns arise in the workplace when people use their work time for social networking. One is that their quality of work and output is hampered. Secondly, and the one the most concerns employers, is the fact that when an employee opens up their computer system to a social network, they are also opening up possible security breeches within the company.

The purpose of social networks is to gather together as many people from all over into one community. And this opens up the doors to the unsavory. Through a variety of tricks any attacker can hack into anyone's personal social networking account and from there they can use this as their launching point to go onto attacking others. This can be quite devastating. Through what is called micro bonnets enabling a person to go through a page of misfired direct messages through Twitter, an attacker can actually find out what someone's cell phone number is. It also gives them access to numbers for some very prominent people that also use these networks.

And if the attacker has enough patience he can sift through misfired direct messages through Twitter and not only discover cell phone numbers, but email addresses, and a variety of other personal information that supposedly is only available to the user and not the general public.

A lot of the problem begins with giving so much creative power to those who have very little technical knowledge, "the average joe," that uses these popular sites. If your privacy settings are off, it's leaving the door wide open to those who know what they are doing. And even if you do set your privacy settings to secure, this still does not guarantee that you will be safe, because the highly technical attacker can hack into just about anything.

Another favorite thing to do by an attacker is to start up fake MySpace pages. Usually this is done by impersonating famous people and then leading the user into believing this is really say, Alice Coopers page, and getting the person to feel safe and secure in divulging information out that they would not normally give out to someone they did not know.

Creating fake pages is more than easy to do and there is nothing implemented that enables the user to validate whether or not the page is fake or whether it's the real deal.

Any type of site that allows anyone to upload pictures, videos, exchange of pictures, text, music and other content with such little easy for the user is always going to open the door for those who are technologically advanced and wreck havoc for not just you but also for many other people that may be connected to you within the networking community.

And if tech attackers aren't bad enough, do we really think that our children are safe being apart of such a thing? Social networking opens up a huge gateway allowing a variety of predators into the private world of children. They are adept at pretending to be a child themselves in order to gain the trust of a child. Children and teenagers need to be well trained in not showing their profile publicly and to make sure that no matter how much they feel they can trust this person, that they just do not give out any of their information. And they should always be warned to never agree to meet with someone they've only talked to within their social network.

Social networking is a wonderful tool to keep in touch with family and friends, but the need to protect ourselves is great and joining any one of the networks available should be done with caution and use of common sense once involved with one.