September 16, 2009, 9:26 AM — Apparently, security executives hate Twitter.
At Forrester Research’s Security Forum held last week in San Diego, the audience got most worked up during two sessions that raised security concerns posed by Twitter. Robert Whiteley, research director of Forrester’s security and risk management team (who was tweeting during both sessions) says in his blog post that the audience broke into thundering applause when two separate speakers spoke out against Twitter.
To Whiteley, it comes as no great surprise that executives who are responsible for security in their organizations – for keep malware and intruders out and confidential information in – abhor this method of communication.
“In all honesty, this makes perfect sense. Twitter is scary. There is the chance that intellectual property could be leaked; that users could click on malware links ingeniously disguised in tiny URLs; or that your company could be liable for inappropriate comments tweeted from a corporate device,” says Whiteley.
Weigh these security risks that Twitter poses to a corporation against the benefits brought by all the random, insignificant tweets that comprise the vast majority of communication on Twitter, and security executives can’t help but want to ban it.
But alas, that is not their role. Instead, security executives must find ways to satisfy employees’ demands while maintaining a relatively secure corporate IT environment. That’s a particularly daunting task when faced with a phenomenon like social media that is spreading like wildfire through corporate cubicles everywhere.
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