While the basic risks of social media are well known to most enterprise security managers, there are many dark corners of social media that can be just as dangerous or even more so. Here are three ways that social media can sneak malware and exploits across your corporate firewalls, and ways that you can pay attention and hopefully prevent their misuse. The biggest issue is that many corporate executives don't really know what is going on across their networks, and don't have any visibility into the traffic patterns and potential exploits.

Back in the early 1990s, we didn't have BlackBerries or any kind of wireless data devices. Phones weren't very "smart," and dial up still ruled the land. Then a trio of companies came together to invent the Viking Express which was a combination of an Ericsson Mobidem wireless data modem that was the size of a small brick, an HP 100 pocket-sized computer that looked more like a big calculator, and software from a company called Radiomail that ran on the DOS operating system of the HP. The world of wireless hasn't been the same since.

I remember sending an email from my car on the New Jersey Turnpike, pulling over after I passed through one of the toll barriers. A cop came along and wanted to know what I was doing. It was probably the first time he had seen such an assemblage of devices.

Last year I wrote this post reviewing 40 years of using email. I am old enough to recall many of those events and while I wasn't exactly present at the dawn of email, I know people who were. But it seems as if email, at least corporate email, has come and is in the process of going all in my own lifetime. A number of factors are making turning off, or at least reducing your email dependency, more viable these days. And I should point out that we are talking here about just eliminating internal emails; no one is suggesting that we go without emails to connect people in different domains.

The Socially Aware blog has put together a nice infographic that highlights several key decisions in social media case law, starting with the Sony v. Universal Supreme Court Betamax recording decision of 1984 and continuing to the more recent past. In light of the SOPA and PIPA protests and discussions of this week, I found the review enlightening and interesting to see how far we have gone in terms of legislating copyright violations and other digital misdeeds. Remember Facebook suing and ultimately crushing Power.com? How about Courtney Love's Tweet that supposedly defamed a fashion designer?

A new report by Jeremiah Owyang out last week describes the growing proliferation of social media across corporations and shows exactly how out of control things have gotten. Owyang, an expert on the topic who is part of the Altimeter Group, has a lot to absorb here. He surveyed 144 corporations using social media along with 27 software vendors who have various management tools to help. One of the nice things about this report is he lists his sources explicitly, so you know the quality of the information. On average, a company has 178 different corporate accounts on various social networks. And that isn't counting the personal accounts. That is a lot of stuff to manage.

A recently published business development analysis by research firm Gartner looked into social networks' need for a more structurally sound revenue stream, and came to the conclusion that to maintain viability and competitiveness, they will soon enter the financial services industry. One Gartner analyst, Juergen Weiss, went so far as to predict that by the end of 2014, one of the major social networks - by implication, Facebook - would enter the business of property and casualty (P&C) insurance.

"Offering insurance products to their communities would be a natural extension of social media providers' financial services strategies," reads Weiss' conclusions, "and would allow them to capitalize on their extensive set of information they constantly collect about their users."

If you thought you had your online banking security situation under control, along comes this chilling blog entry from security vendor Trusteer about some really nasty stuff they observed over the holiday break. And especially for those of you that have chosen paperless statements, you want to read it carefully and understand the exploit.

Just ask the man who signs my paychecks... or at least, go back to October 2007 and ask Richard MacManus, the founder and EIC of this publication. He would tell you directly and succinctly that ReadWriteWeb is not a blog. That is, by the definition of that time, it's not a one-man show. "ReadWriteWeb has evolved," Richard wrote at the time, "into something different than a blog, which is traditionally thought of as the voice of a single person."

Over the years, the complaints I've received from readers (we all receive some) center around the notion of bias - a tendency to interpret a story with the appearance of a certain slant or, perhaps more accurately, from an angle somewhat askew from the angle most others use in their interpretations. If a blog were truly by and about one person, then the appearance of bias would be impossible to avoid. Typically with publications, it is plurality that enables the reader to see the complete picture of subject matter. Plurality, for any organization, requires organization. And at a time when the Web publishing industry's definition of what we do evolves faster than our ability to do it, organization has been difficult to achieve.

"The communications public policy effort that may affect all of us the most in 2012... will take place far from our shores," stated U.S. Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell, in a speech in Washington before a bar association two weeks ago. "As we sit here today, scores of countries, including China, Russia and India, are pushing hard for international regulation of Internet governance."

We talk a lot, almost ad nauseum, about the "free and open Internet." What we sometimes fail to take into account is that freedom has many... shall we say, facets, which cast different shades of light at different angles. From one angle, the story looks like this: The free Internet is threatened by the incursion of governments that would seek to suppress individual freedoms through the systematic restructuring of Web services, with the burden being placed on service providers to comply. But that's not coming from Comm. McDowell, or from the opponents of SOPA legislation. It's the new populist battle cry of Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister seeking once again to become President.

The fact that cloud services and virtualization are making it feasible for executives to oversee the administration of their enterprise networks from devices like smartphones and tablets, has boosted the power of the cloud like no single innovation before. But a new survey commissioned by application performance management tools maker Compuware reveals a possible backlash: CIOs tell the survey they're afraid of everyday consumers having the same potential for access and power that they have.

What does this mean for their technology plans? Nearly two-thirds of CIOs surveyed say that now, their IT mobility tools and services rollout plans have been rendered impossible. Their fear plays out quite literally like this: Consumer trends have driven demand for more bandwidth on public wireless networks, and for public cloud services. Because the public cloud exists, businesses are compelled to adopt it. Adopting public cloud exposes businesses to new dangers. For which consumers are to blame.