Social network gears up for net nasties

Beverley Head
Thursday, 09 December 2010 17:34

Business IT - Networking

Symantec is preparing to launch a social network that will allow the users of its products to share amongst themselves intelligence about emerging computing threats.

According to Keith Buckley, the ANZ regional director of Symantec Hosted Services, the social network service is likely to be made available in the second quarter of 2011, and is currently under development. It would work in a similar way to Salesforce.com's Chatter service, allowing Symantec users to 'follow' one another and share information about the perceived threat landscape.

It would also allow 'like' companies to benchmark themselves against their peers - for example seeing if their exposure to Spam was worse or better than similar companies. It would he said deliver a real power to the community and allow them to share intelligence, rather than constantly have to reinvent the wheel.

The MessageLabs Intelligent 2011 Trends Forecast Report which was released by Symantec earlier this week makes clear that the future threat landscape is likely to be increasingly complex, and pose a significant management challenge for enterprise CIOs. The advent of a CIO level social network could allow better sharing of information about threats as they were detected and dealt with.

One of the clear messages from that report was the emergence of an increasingly mobile workforce, which it argued raised new security issues for corporations.

The report cited IDC statistics suggesting that a billion workers would be mobile or remote from head office for at least part of their working life by the end of 2011. Mr Buckley said that there had been a proliferation of new devices over the last 18 months, and an increased uptake of social network tools in organisations which were posing new security challenges.