People by nature are inclined to trust others, and criminals use this to their advantage again and again. Take the case of the fake social networking profiles established earlier this year for “Robin Sage,” supposedly a young, attractive woman working in the national security arena. A security expert created the fake profiles as a test to see how many security professionals might be fooled by Sage’s persona and share information with her. About 300 people within the United States military and government, as well as security companies, connected with “Robin.” If even sophisticated security experts fail to think twice before exposing personal and corporate information to strangers, imagine what the average employee might do with your proprietary data.

The lesson of this experiment for security experts and all employees is that within social networks, even users who think they are exercising caution by locking up information against people who aren’t members of their social networks can be put at risk by the careless acceptance of connection or friend requests.

** Excerpt from Cisco 2010 Annual Security Report