On the one hand, there is the clear advantage of having the company's brand on the web; the appearance of being part of the leading edge of social interaction.

On the other hand, how does the organization control the message being delivered by a variety of employees and also how do they control the potential for in-bound attacks?

According to the survey, 72% of firms believe that employee's behaviour on social networking sites could endanger their business security.  To support that result, 57% of businesses reported in December that they were the target of spam, phishing and malware attacks via social networking sites, up from 33% in the April survey.

One can only assume that the other 43% didn't notice the intrusion attempts!

When asked to identify the sites that appeared to have the highest risk, 61% selected Facebook, with both Twitter and MySpace attracting one sixth of the votes each; with a minor number of votes for LinkedIn.

Graham Cluley of Sophos noted that "We shouldn't forget, of course, that Facebook is by far the largest social network - and you'll find more bad apples in the biggest orchard."