Illegal Internet Activity a Growing Concern for Enterprise Organizations

WebKnowHow
Wednesday, December 20, 2006; 05:40 AM

8e6 Technologies, a security company dedicated to Internet filtering and reporting, today announced the results of a recent competition to find the most outlandish Internet usage by employees. The results reveal that an increasing number of corporate employees are abusing the Internet for personal gain and putting their organizations at risk of legal liability. The contest sought out stories about the most extreme employee abuse of the Internet during work hours. Of the more than 500 respondents, the winning story went to a computer programmer who discovered one of the employees was using company bandwidth to run his own porn site from the office. Not only was the employee using corporate resources, but after hours he would sneak models into the office and have them pose on the office furniture, including his boss’s office.

“The increased incidence of employee Internet abuse is continuing to cause widespread IT and legal hurdles for many organizations,” commented Eric Lundbohm, vice president of marketing for 8e6. “Without a proper Acceptable Use Policy and effective monitoring tools in place, organizations will continue to see extensive abuse from some of their most trusted assets – their employees.”

Second prize went to a technology manager who discovered an employee who had downloaded a huge amount of prohibited content such as videos, MP3 files and movies to his workstation. He then set up an internal media server to the rest of the company in order to “save” bandwidth. When he was caught, he said, “I was just trying to help.” Third prize was awarded to a network support manager who discovered a male employee who closed his door to run his personal online live sex show during work hours, putting the organization at risk of sexual harassment claims. Other anecdotes can be found on the 8e6 Web site at www.8e6.com.

Based on the responses from over 500 participants, music and movie downloads were a common problem for network security professionals, posing significant legal consequences for organizations. Hosted Web sites within a company’s network and users setting up wireless access points were among the most common infractions of Internet Acceptable Usage Policies cited in the survey. Not surprisingly, however, many of the respondents cited porn searches as one of the most frequent abuses of the Internet.

Participants were also asked to fill out a questionnaire in which results were compared to a similar survey conducted at Interop Las Vegas six months earlier. Recent analysis reports revealed a disturbing 38 percent increase in the incidence of phishing and spam-related breaches from six months ago emphasizing the need for Internet filtering and reporting. In addition, a 17 percent increase in bandwidth consumption resulting from employee time spent on personal e-commerce and personal finance activities were among other serious infractions noted by the participants of the survey. The results also showed a 67 percent increase in the number of respondents who stressed the importance of investing in a real-time monitoring and remediation tool that displays an enterprise’s current security threat level in order to successfully manage the most urgent security breaches as they occur.

Additional Survey Highlights

• More than 77 percent of respondents indicated they would like to incorporate laptop filtering to ensure consistent Internet Acceptable Usage Policies across all computers, regardless of whether they are operating inside or outside the company’s network.
• Nearly half of the respondents are faced with the challenge of incorporating Internet filtering and reporting as part of their company’s overall compliance program and Sarbanes-Oxley audit preparation. This number is up 10 percent from the same survey conducted six months earlier at the Interop Las Vegas conference.
• A growing number of enterprises are requiring Internet filtering and reporting as part of an overall strategy to control employee productivity, up 21 percent from the same Las Vegas conference survey.
• Almost a third of respondents see Web filtering as critical to blocking inappropriate content such as MySpace and Facebook, among other social networking sites.

“We’re moving into a new age of data security threats and the tools which organizations use to manage these threats must become more sophisticated to address the growing security concerns organizations have today,” said Paul Myer, president and COO of 8e6 Technologies. “8e6 Technologies continues to evolve in order to meet these challenges as a growing number of companies begin to see the real value in protecting both their intellectual property and their ability to conduct business without concern over whether or not rogue employees are compromising core values.”

8e6 Technologies is a security company dedicated to Internet filtering and reporting. We are the only Web filtering company that uses a unique “pass-by technology” on a highly scalable appliance.  A Web filtering pioneer since 1995, the company maintains headquarters in Orange, California, with offices in Taipei and Beijing, as well as a network of channel partners worldwide. For more information, visit www.8e6.com.