Fortune 100 Social Accounts Are Vulnerable to Blunders and Hacks

Proofpoint, a security-as-service provider, has released a report on the state of social media infrastructure. The report, “Benchmarking the Social Communication Infrastructure of the Fortune 500″ is the first installment of the three-part study. Parts two and three will be released over the next year. The report found that Fortune 100 companies are growing their social presences at a very fast pace, but the majority of the accounts are vulnerable to security issues.

Some key findings: 

• The average Fortune 100 brand has 320 social media accounts. That rate has increased by 80 percent in the last three years alone.
• As of August 2014, Fortune 100 brands have more than four billion likes, followers, subscribers and plus ones combined on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+ channels. This large population is vulnerable in the event of social channel malware or other malicious activity.
• Brand-generated content accounts for less than seven percent of total content contained within branded social media channels; however, organizations may still be held liable for the other 93 percent of user- and partner-generated content.
• Fortune 100 brands use more than 2,000 unique publishing tools and applications. Companies average 13 distinct publishing tools, creating inefficiencies as well as security and compliance gaps.
• Only 30 percent of corporate social publishing is conducted through enterprise social publishing and relationship management tools. This is despite the fact that direct publishing to the web and via mobile apps bypasses compliance workflows, leads to social media blunders, and can open an organization to account hacking.

In a statement, Devin Redmond, vice president of Nexgate for Proofpoint said:

Social media channels have quickly grown to rival email as a preferred communications medium. The first step in protecting those channels is understanding that infrastructure, and quickly discovering, inventorying, and persistently tracking the accounts and tools a company owns. Once that foundation is in place, the necessary step of eliminating security threats and compliance risks becomes possible.

You can download the full study here.

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