For all of you out there that studiously try to avoid the pompous self-important ramblings of most bloggers out there, here's another good reason; the Storm Worm. No, it's not the name of some new military armoured personnel carrier, but a new variant of a worm which first emerged in January. This time the crafty little bugger has been designed to install multiple files including a Trojan on users' PCs when they click on an email link, open an attachment or visit a malicious site. When said user then comes to write his or her blog or contribute to a bulletin board, the Trojan will insert a malicious link into the text somewhere.

According to Donal Casey of IT and business consultancy Morse, firms should educate employees as to what they should or shouldn't be clicking on. But of course, this little attack has been deliberately focused on the area of blogs and bulletin boards because, just as with social networking sites, there is a kind of assumed safety in the whole community aspect of these sites. People think no-one can, or would want to, penetrate their cosy extended circle of peers and cause mischief. So the only real way of mitigating against these threats, as Casey said, is either blocking these sites altogether, or ensuring your enterprise has the appropriate content security technology that can detect these kind of malicious links and either block access to the site or remove the content before the page is loaded.