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.”

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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.

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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.

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Click on the following link to read the SC Magazine Email security 2007 report.

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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.

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First up is Trend Micro Email Reputation Services, which provides filtering against malicious email content. The platform will eventually offer services covering infrastructure from the gateway to the desktop.

More info on Trend Micro SecureCloud™ Platform.

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More than a third said they thought they checked their Inbox every 15 minutes and 64 per cent said they looked more than once an hour. When researchers fitted monitors to their computers, workers were found to be viewing e-mails up to 40 times an hour. About 33 per cent said they felt stressed by the volume of e-mails and the need to reply quickly. A further 28 per cent said they felt “driven” when they checked messages because of the pressure to respond. Just 38 per cent of workers were relaxed enough to wait a day or longer before replying.

Researchers found that many workers felt “invaded” by e-mails interrupting them as they tried to concentrate on their work. They felt pressured to switch applications to see whether the e-mails were urgent.

Female workers felt under greater pressure to respond than men. Karen Renaud, a computer scientist at Glasgow University, and Judith Ramsay, a psychologist at Paisley University, surveyed almost 200 workers. They concluded: “E-mail has become an indispensable tool in business. However, there is evidence that e-mail can exert a powerful hold over its users and that many computer users experience stress as a result of e-mail-related pressure.”

Ms. Renaud said: “E-mail is the thing that now causes us the most problems in our working lives. It’s an amazing tool, but it’s got out of hand. E-mail harries you. You want to know what’s in there, especially if it’s from a family member or friends, or your boss, so you break off what you are doing to read it.

“The problem is that when you go back to what you were doing, you’ve lost your chain of thought and, of course, you are less productive. People’s brains get tired from breaking off from something every few minutes to check e-mails. The more distracted you are by distractions, including email, then you are going to be more tired and less productive.”

Workers in creative occupations or jobs involving periods of concentration focussing on getting an important project finished — such as academics, writers, architects and journalists — were likely to be worst affected, she said, while those in call centres for whom constant e-mails were integral to their work would not have the same problem.

Source: Times Online

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Over 50% of UK business users are unable to walk away from their emails, even when on leave or off sick, according to the results of Mesmo Consultancy’s latest research on email behaviour as revealed at Inbox/Outbox 2007.

More than half of the 415 respondents check emails when out of the office and 12% check over 5 times a day. When questioned on the main reason for keeping in touch with the office, 67% admitted that it is purely self-inflicted whilst only 20% log in because their office expects them to do so.

In a technology-enabled “always-on” society, where people are connected to their workplace 24/7, email addiction is rapidly becoming a widespread affliction, highlighted by the mushrooming number of internet sites and blogs suggesting rehab tips and techniques. As the Mesmo survey reported, only 17% of respondents give colleagues permission to deal with their emails in their absence and over 80% read every single email in their inbox.

“The role that email plays in office politics (CC and BCC being the most lethal weapons), the fear of missing something and being blamed for it, together with the amount of personal emails received at work addresses are surely accountable for the lack of delegation and obsessive inbox scanning behaviour, contributing directly to the addiction,” commented Dr. Monica Seeley, founder of Mesmo Consultancy. “Moreover, as the survey showed, the majority of users are expecting to receive a reply to a business email in less than 24 hours. And if a reply is sent immediately, that sets the expectation for the next round of communications, fostering a very reactive and rather unproductive way of working.”

Issues around work efficiency and productivity were even highlighted by the way in which the survey’s responses were collected. The research, conducted by email amongst 4000 UK business users with 66% of respondents at managerial/director level, attracted approximately half of the responses within the first hour of sending out the survey. This indicates that the majority of business users are willing to be distracted from the task in hand by emails landing in their inbox, breaking concentration with obvious loss of productivity as a consequence.
Source: PublicTechnology.net

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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

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The rate of customers who are not “very satisfied” is more than 70 percent for six of the eight types of anti-spam technologies. Commercial software filters, such as those produced by McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro, fully satisfy just 22 percent of users, the report found. Filters that come with email clients, like those from Apple, IBM Lotus and Microsoft, fully satisfy only 21 percent of customers.

Satisfaction rates are similarly low for business-class email hosting providers, filtering appliances, and reputation systems known as “real-time black lists” from Commtouch, IronPort and Spamhaus.

The worst-performing technology appears to come from open source projects like SpamPal and SpamAssassin, which fully satisfy just 16 percent of users.

The most-satisfied customers use challenge-response vendors, which fully satisfied users 67 percent of the time.

Challenge-response tools allow messages from known senders without interruption, since virtually all spam comes from first-time senders. First-time senders are challenged with a reply email telling them to reply, click on a URL, or visit a website to complete delivery of the message.

“This procedure overcomes the weakness of spammers since spammers never monitor the reply-to accounts of their messages,” the Brockmann report said.

Hosted email filtering services such as Google-Postini, AppRiver, and MXLogic performed second best, as customers report being very satisfied 42 percent of the time. These services use the processing power of Internet data centres to scour enormous quantities of email and find suspicious messages, Brockmann said.

People get an average of 11 spam messages per day, accounting for 15 percent of all messages, Brockmann said. That’s after the work done by spam filters. Before filtering, probably 90 percent of email is spam, they say.

Source: Techworld.com

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If you are an Email Administrator or Compliance Officer, then please visit the Dicontas - Email Filtering Services website for more benefits on this unique value-added service for any email filtering or email monitoring system.

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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

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What this plugin does, is that is creates 3 images on every page of your WordPress site, and populated these images ALT tags with different combinations of the following blog strings:

• Wordpress Site’s Name
• Wordpress Site’s Description
• Wordpress Page’s Title (if you are on homepage, category page or archives page)
• WordPress Post’s Title (if you are on a single post page)

The uniqueness and second benefit of this plugin is that the 3 images are also used to allow your web site visitors to increase the font size, decrease the font size or to return the font size back to the default size. This assists any visitor with any accessibility difficulties to read your web site without having to change their own browser’s viewing settings.

This plugin helps to increase your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) score by up to 5%, but it is also a fully working font re-sizer tool.

You can read more background on this plugin here: SEO Alt Tag Optimizer & Font Resizer Tool (WordPress plugin)

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This WordPress 2.0, 2.1 & 2.2 compatible plugin saves your site administrator in having to manually add the URLs of all the tag pages each time you add a new UTW tag onto a new post.

This release automatically reads all the necessary UTW settings and associated tag tables so that no configuration changes are necessary to execute this time-saving plugin.

For further information on the plugin, visit Google Sitemaps - Ultimate Tag Warrior - Tag Addon for WordPress

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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

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Source: Talk with Jordan Ayan, CEO of SubscriberMail (Email Experience Council Mailshot)

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BlackSpider is a key asset for Websense in the acquisition because it provides email and web filtering managed services, protecting companies from viruses, spyware, phishing, and other malware, Gene Hodges, CEO at Websense, said in a conference call.

Websense plans to leverage SurfControl’s small business savviness as well as incorporate elements of its channel strategy, said Doug Wride, CFO at San Diego-based Websense. Wride will take over as president of Websense and lead the SurfControl integration efforts.

Websense sees strong demand for managed web and email security services, which makes the BlackSpider portfolio a good fit, Hodges said, adding that the two companies would have more than 41 million seats under subscription if the deal is approved.

Source: CRN

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