Courtney Klein on Social Media & Security
A Restructured Paradigm for Corporate Teamwork By Courtney Klein of Soteria Risk Consultants Social media has become an integral part of everyday life. It’s how some of us get our news, research our opinions, learn about local events, and connect with friends. For the modern western business, it is also immensely important for staying in touch with customers, advertising, and overall visibility. For this reason, many companies employ veritable armies of “Social Media Specialists” that do everything from designing graphics to writing tweets to replying to customer questions and complaints. Some companies interact with each other (such as the hilarious and long-standing Twitter Battle between Wendy’s and McDonald's), and some use it as their primary form of communication. Customers, too, know that social media is a way to get in touch with a company - for good reasons and for bad - and while many companies are aware that they will and do receive threats on social media, very few of them have any kind of protocol in place for how to deal with them – and even fewer still encourage their social media teams to pass this information on to or (better yet) work together with their security team. This sort of blasé attitude to threats – either because “it’s not my job” or “they can’t be serious” – leads to [...]