Article originally appeared in Securities Industry News. New channels of electronic communication have been a boon to many industries, opening up sales and marketing opportunities, helping improve customer service and speeding up innovation and collaboration. For Wall Street, however, the benefits of technology such as Twitter have to be weighed against the compliance pains. Twitter, launched by San Francisco-based Obvious in late 2006 before being spun off, is a cross between an online discussion board and instant messaging system, allowing people to post short updates–capped at 140 characters–on their activities. Users can subscribe to each other’s updates, or tweets, and have them sent to their Twitter screens. Some Twitter posters develop armies of followers. Read full article. … Read more »

This article originally appeared in Securities Industry News. As the Web 2.0 movement makes interactive applications and social networks such as Facebook ubiquitous on employees’ desktop computers, financial firms are facing the daunting task of monitoring these so-called greynets. Instant messaging security vendor FaceTime Communications estimates that there are more than 600 greynets worldwide, a number that will climb past 1,000 by the end of the year. These networks are called greynets because the peer-to-peer applications they are composed of operate in the shadows, without company authorization, and are difficult to police. According to a recent survey by FaceTime’s Security Labs research unit, 90 percent of IT managers have experienced a greynet-related security incident in the last six months–despite deploying firewalls and intrusion prevention systems. On average, IT managers spent $289,000 in … Read more »