Proofpoint’s 4th annual study of outbound email and content security issues (http://www.proofpoint.com/outbound), found that outbound email and other electronic communication protocols continue to grow as a source of risk for companies.Proofpoint’s survey of 308 email decision-makers at large U.S. companies shows expanding concern over sensitive information leaving enterprises through outbound email and other electronic communications channels.
The study found that 32.1% of surveyed companies with 1,000 or more employees hire staff to read or analyse the contents of outbound email. 38.8% of larger companies surveyed (those with more than 20,000 employees) employ staff for this purpose. Additionally, 16.9% of companies surveyed employ staff whose primary or exclusive job responsibility is to read or otherwise analyse email content.
Nearly 28% have terminated employees for email policy violations; 20% have disciplined employees for improper use of blogs/message boards; 14% for social network violations; 11% for improper use of media sharing sites.
Email remains a primary source of information leakage, which can result in regulatory compliance violations, legal problems and loss of competitive position. Respondents estimated that nearly 20% of all outbound email poses a legal, regulatory or financial risk.
More than a third of surveyed companies investigated a suspected email leak of confidential or proprietary information in the past 12 months.
Source: Proofpoint
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, reveals that revenues in the European Content Security Market totalled $1.80 billion in 2006, and are likely to reach $3.35 million in 2010.
The European content security market is gathering pace, particularly with enterprise security gaining priority due to the ever increasing need to protect critical information from the emerging threats and attacks. Furthermore, employee productivity is becoming an area of focus and in the recent past, Europe has also been reviving its legislative directives, necessitating greater investments in security. These factors, coupled with the growing consolidation, are like to provide entry and exit options for the investment community.
“The European security industry at large is in the limelight, as growing signs of market maturity in the North American region have heightened the focus on the less mature European and the growing Asian markets” notes Frost & Sullivan Senior Research Analyst Raja Srinivasan. “Regulatory compliances, employee productivity concerns, and the growing demand for proactive solutions to counter new and innovative security threats are all expected to drive content security investments across Europe.”
Source: Frost & Sullivan
In a landmark case in 2006 on the subject of bullying in the workplace; the House of Lords have changed the law so as to make employers liable for workplace harassment even if they were not in any way negligent.
The House of Lords decided that the Prevention from Harassment Act 1997 covers the behaviour of employees at work even when the employer has not caused or failed to prevent the offending behaviour. Those employers now have vicarious liability for the acts of employees.
Previously, employees had to prove that the employer was negligent in not stopping bullying taking place and that it had caused them psychological damage.
The new ruling means that companies can be sued even if the company cannot be expected to have known about the bullying, and this ruling is certainly wide enough to include the use of inappropriate image materials as the vehicle for e-bullying.
This decision has serious implications for employers as it gives employees who are bullied or harassed at work a further basis on which to claim compensation from their employers. Moreover, some of the existing limitations and defences will not be available. For example, an employer has a defence under existing discrimination legislation if it can show that it took all reasonably practicable steps to prevent discriminatory harassment occurring – this defence was recently made out where an employer had implemented an effective harassment policy. This would not help an employer facing a claim that it was vicariously liable for an employee’s harassment under the Prevention from Harassment Act 1997.
As we know that harassment takes place in the workplace through the use of pornographic images, it seems that the only avenue forward for employers in avoiding the breadth of this decision is to technologically interdict the harassment and the inappropriate image content employed therein so as to stop it reaching the intended target.
This new law should make employers realise that an effective email and image filtering solution is now a must for any digital workplace and is now the only legal defence in terms of the law and vicarious liability.
Source: image-analyzer.com
A recent study from PixAlert, found pornography on one in four PCs despite the use of content filtering technology at the gateway.
PixAlert audited 10,000 PCs on 125 business and public sector networks over the last 9 months. The study found that 25% of the computers contained pornography or “other inappropriate images.” The same audit found that 12.4% of the 12,000 e-mail accounts and 5.4% of 26,000 file server shares scanned were similarly affected.
“With over a third of all images found created in the last 12 months, it is clear that a significant number of employees continue to ignore corporate policies and in some cases are going to extraordinary lengths to bypass protection systems in order to obtain and distribute inappropriate material,” said Andy Churley, a director at PixAlert, in a written statement. “Corporate officers wrongly assume that boundary protection systems stop all digital pornography from entering the organization but, in PixAlert’s experience, almost all corporations will have a significant amount of pornography on their networks.”
The study found that 46.8% of the images showed full nudity or sexual activity and 0.3% of all the images were determined to be illegal. While 35% were downloaded online images, 45.2% of the images detected came from e-mails. The study also found that 35.5% were sent internally.
“While all organisations actively discourage access to inappropriate images at work, our audits show that the reality is that all establishments have a lot of digital pornography residing on their networks that they don’t know about. Companies are particularly concerned when they have visibility of the number of pornographic images being distributed by e-mail internally or sent out to other organisations using a corporate e-mail address.” said Churley.
Source: InformationWeek, 17 April 2007
Dicontas is now a MessageLabs Associate partner and is authorised to sell MessageLabs email security services.
MessageLabs is a provider of best-of-breed managed email security services for email, web and instant messaging communications - protecting globally over 13,000 customers from the latest viruses, spam and inappropriate content.
For more information, please visit Dicontas Services for MessageLabs Image Filtering & Content Control page.
Dicontas offers centralised email administration services to complement use of this managed service by helping to decrease the total cost of ownership and other business / legal risks when introducing and utilising email monitoring within the workplace.
Commercialisation of cyber-crime, growing complexity of threats and digitization of information have all served to make anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-spy and other email filtering applications indispensable for today’s organisations. Reflecting this, IT managers and chief technology officers (CTOs) have begun to increase their spending on content security application, thereby ensuring the healthy growth of the North American content security market.
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, North American Content Security Market - Investment Analysis and Growth Opportunities, reveals that revenues in this market totalled $2.19 billion in 2005, and can reach $4.28 billion in 2012.