I’m at the 2010 RSA Con­fer­ence here in San Fran­cisco this week report­ing for Trip­wire.

Before the expo floor opened, I sneaked in (yes, seri­ously, at the secu­rity con­fer­ence), and got a pre­view of Sophos’ pre­sen­ta­tion on pro­tect­ing your­self from social net­work­ing mal­ware. After his prepara­tory run through, I asked “media tart” (his words, not mine) Gra­ham Clu­ley (@gcluley) if I could inter­view him on how to pro­tect your­self and your com­pany from mal­ware over social net­works. He pro­vided some good tips. Some of them I’m sure you’ve heard before, but do you actu­ally adhere to them all? Here’s a sum­mary of his recommendations:

• Get an anti-virus pro­gram that scans every link you click on.
• Just because some­one who says they’re you’re friend, they’re not necessarily.
• To pro­tect your­self from what’s behind a short URL, add a plu­gin to your browser that gives you a pre­view of what the long URL is. As a Fire­fox user, Clu­ley rec­om­mends Long URL Please.
• Use dif­fer­ent pass­words for dif­fer­ent sites. Clu­ley says 33% of peo­ple use the same pass­word for every sin­gle site. I per­son­ally use Roboform2Go for pass­word memorization.
• Don’t use a dic­tio­nary word as your pass­word. Pick some­thing dif­fi­cult that com­bines let­ters and numbers.
• The scam­mers are always out to get you. Make sure you’re aware of the threats by read­ing secu­rity blogs. He highly sug­gested you fan the offi­cial secu­rity page on Face­book.

Read more of Graham’s tips on secu­rity on his blog. And please check out more of Tripwire’s cov­er­age from the 2010 RSA Con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco.David Spark helps busi­nesses grow by devel­op­ing thought lead­er­ship through sto­ry­telling and cov­er­ing live events at Spark Media Solu­tions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen reg­u­larly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvo­rak, and KQED in San Fran­cisco. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact David, or leave a com­ment below.