Social networking costs UK businesses billions

UK businesses are losing around £6.5 billion a year through lost productivity, as a result of the popularity of social networking sites and their use in the workplace.

According to research carried out by IT security firm Global Secure Systems (GSS) and security conference Infosecurity 2008 776 office workers surveyed admitted spending 30 minutes a day visiting social networking sites including Bebo, Facebook and MySpace at work.

Infosecurity also revealed data from a meeting of 20 senior information security professionals that highlighted the impact of social networking sites on business as one of the biggest concerns for the coming year. The group estimated that between 15 -20 per cent of bandwidth used at work was taken up with social networking sites and that for many a complete ban was the only answer.

"It would appear that most [security professionals] and IT directors loathe social networking sites and if they had it their way would ban them completely," said Infosecurity director Claire Sellick.

"But what is also coming across loud and clear is that the HR departments actually welcome the use of these sites - so there is a lot of internal pushing and shoving going on between HR and IT over how best to manage these sites."

GSS argued that organisations need to implement a properly enforced and maintained 'reasonable use' policy, and for individuals to use common sense when using social networks.

"What is apparent are the serious security implications associated with social networking, where hackers, exploiters and extortionists are worming their way into these sites extracting all sorts of information on the members," said GSS' managing director, David Hobson.

"Our advice as always to anybody using these sites is to give as little personal information as possible."

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