Lexington County Public Library patrons can no longer access such social networking Web sites as Facebook, YouTube and Match.com at the library.The primary reason for the decision was research that shows social networking sites can make computer systems vulnerable to viruses, said Dan MacNeill, executive director of the Lexington County Public Library.“This is security for our network system, our computers.”The library hasn’t encountered such problems, but library officials said they want to be proactive.“We knew it was going to be a problem for some folks … and it was not done without a tremendous amount of thought, and a tremendous amount of research,” said David Fellows, chairman of the Lexington County Library Board and owner of a computer business.Greenville County and some libraries in North Carolina also have restricted the use of social networking sites, said Sam Hastings, director of the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information science.
Sad to say this is accurate. Web 2.0 is becoming a huge attack vector, as this Network World article describes.
Filed under: Filtering, Libraries, Malicious Websites, Security
[...] Thanks to David Burt for alerting me to this original article from Lexington, South Carolina. [...]