Almost half of UK companies have dismissed employees over the past year due to e-mail abuse and over half regularly keep tabs on employees’ use of e-mail to make sure they remain compliant with company policy, a survey has found.
The survey also found that nearly half of the UK’s companies conducted investigations into e-mail leaks of confidential or sensitive data over the same period. These figures show that UK companies are more suspicious of and more rigorous in checking employees’ use of e-mail than their counterparts in Germany and France.
Research carried out by Forrester on behalf of e-mail security firm Proofpoint found that 44% of UK companies had fired employees in the past year because of violation of e-mail policies while 78% of them had disciplined workers for the same offence.
It also found that 53% of UK companies surveyed regularly audited outbound e-mail content while 47% have investigated a leak in the last year.
Companies’ principal worries about e-mail use are that employees could be breaking financial disclosure or corporate governance rules, could be leaking intellectual property or trade secrets, could be leaking sensitive memos or could be breaching privacy regulations.
The report highlights “the convenience and ubiquity of e-mail as a business communications tool” and acknowledges that e-mail has “exposed enterprises to a wide variety of legal, financial and regulatory risks associated with outbound email”. The report continues, “Enterprises continue to express a high level of concern about creating, managing and enforcing outbound messaging policies.”
Email compliance is a necessary corporate objective to ensure that email communication remains free of inappropriate materials that may damage or strain the relationships between your workforce. Many managers see the protection against viruses, spyware and email spam as being the highest priority and they are there are a plethora of tools to enable companies to do this pretty well - as this is a mature market, but some organisations overlook content filtering.
Email filtering is a tool to allow both inbound and outbound emails to be scanned for abusive materials that are likely to break existing ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ statements and runs the risk of upsetting staff that read and are hurt or angered by the proliferation of such inappropriate content.
IT Managers have three solutions to implement email filtering: namely, a managed service where emails are scanned whilst travelling between the company and the internet; a server appliance, where emails are scanned within the company network and is automatically configured to run immediately; or a email server add-on program, which is installed, configured and manually maintained by the companies IT department and either installed on the email server or on another dedicated server . All three solutions are viable for most modern organisations, but the managed service option has most effective content filter as its algorithm for detecting inappropriate content is constantly updated in line with real-time attacks that are happening over many of its own client base. The effectiveness of the other two in-house solutions depend on the skills of the companies IT department and the email filtering vendors capacity to keep its scanning engine up to date with the latest rules to identify and stop the latest inappropriate content.
MessageLabs has warned that spammers are already modifying their tactics when it comes to the emerging trend of using audio rather than text attachments in unsolicited mail.
In a statement, MessageLabs claimed that, following the first spam campaign involving audio files on 17 October 2007, which attempted to control the value of stock for “nefarious reasons”, spammers are now moving on from simply attaching audio to mail to linking through to content hosted on multimedia sites such as YouTube.
“This recent trend proves that spamming techniques are becoming more innovative,” said MessageLabs in its statement. “As image spam shifts from email attachments to images on free image-hosting sites, [we] believe that it is only a matter of time before the spammers apply the same approach to audio spam and upload the message to free multimedia-hosting sites such as YouTube, Google Video and MySpace.”
Spammers used attached MP3 music files to try to “sneak messages past spam filters”, said MessageLabs. The spam run of 15 million emails lasted 36 hours and used Storm worm-infected computers for the purposes of dissemination, MessageLabs said.
The MP3 file names were music-related, including files called “beatles.mp3″, “britney.mp3″ and “elvis.mp3″. They contained a poor-quality, 25-second voice track promoting a stock offering from Exit Only Incorporated for its Text4Cars.com website. The spam did not contain any detected malicious code.
SC Magazine has conducted an assessment on Email Encryption enterprise solutions and products.
Click on the following link to read the SC Magazine Email security 2007 report.
UK IT managers are spending more than 5 million hours per year searching for lost emails, according to a survey.
The wasted effort equates to more than £140m in staff costs, says the poll from e-Media, commissioned by email management specialist Mimecast.
Email is the most important communication method between businesses, but too often filtering systems are weeding out valid messages.
Sixty per cent of the survey’s 100 respondents said they had lost important emails. More than half check their mail quarantines daily and another 22 per cent check it a few times a week.
Source: vnunet.com
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Users of Yoomba can make calls or send instant messages to anyone with an e-mail address and a telephone headset. The service, similar to Skype, is completely free, no matter the location of your call, and it also has a voicemail feature for any missed calls.
Yoomba connects users using nothing more than their email address. It doesn’t matter who provides your email or what free email service you use.