Social Media Apps Pose Biggest Enterprise Threat – Survey

IT managers should be aware of the internal risks posed by staffer’s use of social media applications, but many have no application management tech in place.

This is the conclusion from a study carried out at Infosecurity Europe by networking monitoring specialist Gigamon.

The use of personal devices within corporate networks has been on the rise for many years now – the so-called bring your own device (BYOD) trend, and this has been a source of security headaches for corporate IT teams.

Social Media

The Gigamon study was carried out in June 2019 at Infosecurity Europe in London and gathered the feedback from 217 IT professionals.

It found that 17 percent of organisations are adding as many ten new applications into enterprise networks every day. But unfortunately 14 percent do not have policies in place to manage their security.

And the study found that 26 percent of organisations have no idea how many applications are being added to their network each day, while 11 percent do not know if tools are deployed to manage their security.

“Today’s organisations are heavily dependent on applications, and employees will often use them to perform key parts of their job,” said Ollie Sheridan, security engineer for EMEA at Gigamon.

“However, it also means these applications can have access to sensitive corporate data which could put an organisation at risk if it fell into the wrong hands,” warned Sheridan. “Organisations should therefore treat applications as part of their own network and aim to have complete visibility of their functions.”

But which type of applications do IT professionals believe bring in the most malware to the enterprise?

A staggering 42 percent of respondents believe social media apps bring in the most malware; 17 percent point to TV streaming apps; 12 percent blame gaming and messaging apps. Weather-related apps are regarded by only 1 percent of respondents as posing a risk,

A Kaspersky Lab survey from 2015 found many workers are not securing company data on their personal devices, with one in ten admitting they were “seriously concerned” about keeping work information safe should cybercriminals gain access to their device.

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