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London, UK (19th June 2008)– FaceTime Communications today announced that its Unified Security Gateway (USG) now enables organisations to secure and manage the nearly 2,000 MySpace applications that have been developed by third parties and provide the flexibility to allow some or all employees to access their MySpace profiles.

“As a new generation enters the workforce they expect to have access to the same social networking sites they use at home,” comments Nick Sears, VP EMEA of FaceTime Communications. “Not just for their own personal amusement, but to collaborate with colleagues on work issues too. Completely inhibiting their use will eventually impact on business productivity, so companies need to look at ways of enabling users, whilst controlling applications that maybe harmful to the organisation.”

The increasing use of social networking on company PCs raises numerous concerns for IT managers, from productivity and bandwidth loss to risks of inbound malware to information leakage. Over the past year, FaceTime Security Labs has uncovered myriad scams, phishing schemes, profile hijacks and various other malicious activities on MySpace.

Last Autumn, FaceTime Director of Malware Research Christopher Boyd uncovered a MySpace hijack scheme*, where MySpace Music pages were hacked using a transparent overlay that, when clicked, redirected the visitor to spyware installs and fake security tool installs. The availability of applications and widgets to customise social networking profiles has added a new dimension to IT concerns.

Since MySpace first approved applications from third party developers in March 2008, the top 20 most popular applications have been downloaded by more than 18 million MySpace users. This granular control of MySpace is complementary to the USG’s support for more than 20,000 Facebook widgets, as was announced at the RSA Conference in April 2008. USG also supports granular control of other social networking sites including Bebo, Friendster and LinkedIn.

A complete guide to the characteristics and risks of more than 25,000 Web 2.0, social networking and real-time applications and how they behave on the network is available on FaceTime’s Greynets Guide Web site at www.greynetsguide.com.

*http://blog.spywareguide.com/2007/10/bandjammer_hacking_a_myspace_m.html

ENDS

About FaceTime Communications
FaceTime Communications enables the safe and productive use of instant messaging, Web usage and Unified Communications platforms. Ranked number one by IDC for four consecutive years, FaceTime's award-winning solutions are used by more than 900 customers – including nine of the 10 largest U.S. banks – for security, management and compliance of real-time communications. FaceTime supports or has strategic partnerships with all leading public and enterprise IM network providers, including AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Skype, IBM, Reuters and Jabber.

FaceTime is headquartered in Belmont, California. For more information visit http://www.facetime.com.

Media Contact:
Sara Claridge
Marylebone Media Relations
sara@marylebone.co.uk
+44 (0) 20 8133 5572
+44 (0) 7968 626838 (mobile)
www.marylebone.co.uk


Contact Name: Sara Claridge
Role: Director
Company: Marylebone Media Relations
Contact Email: click to reveal e-mail
Contact Phone: 02081335572
Company Website: http://www.marylebone.co.uk

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myspace | social networking | security | facetime |

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it/internet/software

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