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
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
A survey conducted in the financial districts of London and New York suggests that Wall Street workers are more aware of compliance breaches and monitored electronic communication than their City colleagues, but are also more likely to try to dodge communication controls.
A total of 300 people working in Wall Street and the City were surveyed by Orchestria, a company which makes software to enforce employees to use network resources in accordance with company policy and international regulations.
The research discovered that more than 60 per cent of respondents in New York thought that it was right that their employer should monitor their email. By contrast, only 38 per cent in London supported their firm’s right to monitor email.
Source : vnunet