With over 175 million users Facebook has become an ideal place to proliferate and spread ridiculously potent viruses.  The only solution is to completely block social networking websites from the workplace.  The newest of the viruses is the ‘Koobface‘ worm – it phishes its way onto user computers by getting users to open messages that appear to be sent from their Facebook friends.

Facebook in the Workplace
Facebook users and internet marketers have been pushing, often staunchly, for the privilege to use the social network while at work. Management didn’t really care about the harm to their IT infrastructure, for the most part they worried about the potential (and later observed) decline in productivity associated with allowing access to the website.

In 2007, Siemens banned Facebook from its offices then quickly backtracked by embracing the website and creating a corporate image for itself on the social network – currently it has well over 6,000 users and membership to its group is ‘invite only.’  You can find a group page for just about any established corporation – and many of the groups are not managed from within the company.  That said, it would be great foresight for a company to establish its own presence on any social network; hence, providing the highest level of control over their online corporate image.

Now What?
How can a company manage current threats without blocking Facebook altogether?  The short answer is that they cannot.  The Koobface virus is so crafty that even the most tech-saavy users are tricked into clicking through on links that appear to be sent from friends.  An entire company network can be paralyzed (or critically damaged) very quickly, in fact, all it takes is for a virus to be downloaded to a single computer in the network.

So that’s it…the case for totally blocking social networking websites at work has been established, once and for all.

By the way…
This doesn’t mean that companies should remove their corporate pages from social networking websites – it’s absolutely critical to keep abreast of all new web technologies and maintain a strong presence throughout the web.

Koobface Worm Example
Koobface takes you to a video site and asks you to download updates – Hello Virus…welcome to my computer!

And here’s the text message I received from an alert friend earlier this week:
“Facebook worm takes over ur computer. Don’t download any video from any friend or update ur video player to see it!!! Someone in our office just got screwed!