Social networking is a significant threat to information security in an organization, a new survey found.

That was the finding of a research report on security conducted by security provider McAfee and released at its Security Summit in London this week.

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While 62 percent of respondents said social networking was at the top of their threat list, the growth of emails and other unstructured data came in second at 59 percent.

When it came to mobile security, the single biggest problem remains not the technology but the practices and behaviors of users, with employees’ failure to follow data-retention policies (59 percent) and lost or stolen devices (58 percent) topping the list of issues.

Other key findings include:
• Bad BYOD policy? IT professionals harbor deep concerns about the impact of BYOD on security and threat management. Only 19 percent said their organizations had a comprehensive BYOD policy for users’ personal mobile devices.
• Personal risks: 46 percent of respondents thought personally owned consumer devices represent a significant threat, compared with only 27 percent who thought the same of consumer devices issued by the business.
• Attracting cloudy threats: 60 percent f respondents felt cloud computing’s growing prominence and market visibility made cloud-based applications more inviting as threat targets for cybercriminals.
• Complexities of virtualization: 49% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that supporting a mix of physical and virtual machines makes infrastructure security far more difficult than it had been with physical-only