GSS reveals perils of social networking sites

The company says it practices what it preaches on its company network, using Internet filtering software. “Our Internet bandwidth requirements recently came up for review and it was suggested we would need an upgrade, costing a few thousand pounds more a year,” says David Hobson, managing director of GSS. “After analysing the traffic patterns, however, we realised that around 25% of our web usage was for social networking sites, such as Facebook. After locking down this traffic, we found we didn’t actually need to upgrade our bandwidth after all,” he adds. “The perils of social network web sites are not just on the financial front, as newswire reports over the weekend reveal that the MySpace Web portal has been hacked, with attackers planting malware on a number of musicians’ sites, most notably that of popular singer Alicia Keys,” he says. “Alicia Keys’ MySpace pages were booby-trapped last week, and even when the social networking company cleaned up the pages, they were promptly re-hacked within a matter of hours.”