Marines ban social networking sites
WASHINGTON. August 6. KAZINFORM. Most folks who use it are aware that the Internet, especially social networking websites, can be hazardous due to hackers. The Indian Army issued a warning earlier this year stating, "All professional info must be taken off the internet immediately and defense personnel must be careful while posting pictures that may disclose their whereabouts, or any other professional info on public forums"; Kazinform refers to Arab News.
Now, on Monday, the US Marine Corps banned social networking sites including, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, "effective immediately." The Marine Corps order noted that social networking sites "in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user-generated content and targeting by adversaries."
The order also noted that social networking sites expose unnecessary information to adversaries and give them an easy conduit for information that puts operations security and communications security at an elevated risk of compromise.
The Marines' ban will last a year. It was drawn up in response to a late July warning from US Strategic Command, which told US military leaders that it was considering a Defense Department-wide ban on the Web 2.0 sites due to network security concerns. Scams, worms, and Trojans often spread unchecked throughout social media sites, passed along from one online friend to the next. So the Pentagon is now reviewing its social networking policy for the entire Department of Defense; the review should be completed by the end of September. This is important, as the policy for the entire military is somewhat fragmented: the US Army ordered military bases to allow access to social media sites in May.
About 63% of 709 system administrators polled by Sophos in February 2009 worried that employees were sharing too much personal information on their social networking profiles and, as a result, putting sensitive corporate data at risk. Criminals are also getting more sophisticated in using social media sites to spread malicious code, or malware. They use Twitter, for instance, to try to get people to click on bad links; Kazinform cites Arab News. See www.arabnews.com for full version.