According to the results of a new survey by security firm Clearswift, increasing fears about Internet security has apparently prompted nearly one-third of the companies in the UK to block their staff from using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

As per the survey, there has been a three-fold increase in the proportion of UK businesses that are restricting employees’ access to social networking sites --- while only about 9 percent of the British firms had implemented social media bans in 2010; the figure has now increased to 32 percent.

Elaborating the reason behind why a growing number of companies are having social networking bans in place for their employees, Clearswift said that the move is seemingly an upshot of a series of high-profile hacking incidents – including the recent attacks on Sony – which have made the managers apprehensive that employees may either leak official information or may be trapped into downloading computer viruses.

Commenting on the situation, Clearswift’s chief operating officer Andrew Wyatt said that the huge publicity that the hacking incidents have got has probably caused a “knee-jerk” reaction among the businesses to curb the use of the Internet by the employees.

Noting that “businesses have reacted to the series of high-profile data leaks and have become increasingly nervous about its usage from the workplace,” Wyatt said that though the social networking sites hardly have in role in data-loss incidents, “they have become guilty by association, because they are seen as having an impact on a company’s brand.”