Intelligent CISO Issue 12 | Page 19

cyber trends e.g. through adverts, shares, plug-ins – than comparable sources, such as e-commerce, digital media or corporate websites • Social media has fuelled a 36% increase in the recruitment of ‘millennial money mules’ since 2016 and has increased fraud revenues by 60% since 2017 “Social media platforms have become near ubiquitous and most corporate employees access social media sites at work, which exposes significant risk of www.intelligentciso.com | Issue 12 attack to businesses, local governments as well as individuals,” said Gregory Webb, CEO of Bromium. “Hackers are using social media as a trojan horse, targeting employees to gain a convenient backdoor to the enterprise’s high-value assets. Understanding this is the first step to protecting against it, but businesses must resist knee jerk reactions to ban social media use – which often has a legitimate business function – altogether. “Instead, organisations can reduce the impact of social media-enabled attacks by adopting layered defences that utilise application isolation and containment. “This way, social media pages with embedded but often undetected malicious exploits are isolated within separate micro-virtual machines, rendering malware infections harmless. “Users can click links and access untrusted social-media sites without risk of infection.” 19