Social networking sites, which have mushroomed all over the web, and are used extensively by Indian organizations, have become a nightmare for CIOs – especially with respect to security. A recent survey on Web 2.0 usage in the workplace by vendor Websense corroborates this fact.

The company revealed the findings from a global survey of 1,300 information technology managers across ten countries, asking about their perceptions of Web 2.0 in the workplace, testing their understanding of Web 2.0 technologies and assessing their organizations’ level of security preparedness.

Web 2.0 sites and applications allow user-generated content and comprise the majority of the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet, including search engines like Google and Yahoo, resources like Wikipedia and news sites like CNN.

In India, Web 2.0 is already pervasive in the workplace, with more than 70 percent of the organizations surveyed allowing access to wikis, and 40 percent allowing access to social networking websites such as Facebook. However, while more than 70 percent of these companies have URL filtering software, only 39 percent block instant messaging attachments, and only 41 percent of the respondents had a mechanism to detect embedded malicious code on trusted websites.

While threats can occur anywhere on the Internet, the research from Websense Security Labs shows that the top 100 most visited Web properties–which tend to be social networking sites and search engines–are a growing target of attackers. In fact, websites allowing user-generated content comprise the majority of the top 50 most active distributors of malicious content on the Web