Security and Social Networking.

Social media is here to stay despite the challenges that it presents for web security. So perhaps it’s time to take a long hard look at your network security defences and see if they are up to muster in these days of social networking and web applications?

The Web Application Dilemma

Web applications have changed the game as far as IT Security is concerned. The problem is that social media has a growing number of legitimate business uses. Organisations of all types are increasingly using social media to connect with both the public and their customer base. Yet social media sites are also targeted by cybercriminals as a means of getting their malware onto your employees  PC’s.  You also have to ask whether you want to give your staff access to Facebook for legitimate business reasons without at least having some control mechanism that will prevent them from playing Facebook games when they should be doing the job that they are being paid for.

Bandwidth Considerations

An increasing amount of internet content comprises streaming video and audio. Much of this is “good” video being used by companies to deliver marketing messages and technical previews of their products, but too much streaming media coming in through your internet connection can mean that your company extranet and secure remote access services suffer. In an ideal world you should therefore have a way of not only having an “on or off” switch for streaming applications, but also a throttle mechanism to allow you to keep a proportion of your internet bandwidth available for more business critical applications.

Good and Bad Web Applications?

So Facebook is good (with appropriate controls), YouTube is good (in moderation), but what about the plethora of other web applications? Should your users really have Spotify streaming their favourite tunes to their desks? Applications such as Dropbox are great for personal usage, but you have presumably spent a considerable amount of money over the years in software to make sure that your email is virus-free, and Dropbox has just bypassed all of your carefully constructed gateway security!

Is It Time To Overhaul Your Firewall?

The real answer to all of these issues is to upgrade to a Next Generation firewall. Next Generation firewalls from SonicWall and McAfee provide you with visibility of web applications passing through your internet gateway and allow you to regain control of your internet security. The first step is to be able to audit what traffic is passing through your firewall. Armed with this information, you are able to take informed decisions as to whether a specific web application should be allowed through your firewall, and if the answer is yes you can then decide whether to scan it for internet borne malware (even within an SSL encrypted tunnel), as well as whether to apply either a bandwidth or time of day policy. All of this can be implemented on a per user basis if appropriate.

Social Networking Can Be Controlled.

The advent of the “Web 2” world comprising social networking sites, web applications and streaming media presents some significant challenges to maintaining the security of your networks, but major manufacturers such as McAfee and SonicWall have addressed these new threats through McAfee Firewall Enterprise and the SonicWall NSA firewalls respectively. If you would like some advice on implementing a Next Generation Firewall solution, please contact us.