Survey Of Over 400 IT Managers Reveals What Employees Are Really Doing During Work Hours… And You Won’t Believe What They Discovered!
According to a survey conducted by 8e6 Technologies (www.8e6.com), employees are using company computers, Internet access, email, and other resources to conduct hours of non-work related activities.
Some of these activities simply waste time, like day trading and monitoring eBay bids.
However, many of the activities are downright malicious and threaten their employers’ existence and security.
Just look at some of these outrageous real-life stories collected from IT Managers polled:
- One employee was caught running a gambling website and acting as a bookie for his coworkers.
- To bypass the company’s web filter, one employee was caught using his desktop computer as an FTP server for the other employees. He had downloaded and saved over 300 GB of material.
- One employee was busted for giving away confidential information such as price lists, contracts, and software code for application development.
- Another employee was busted for having a side business stealing and selling company inventory on eBay.
- One woman was caught running an online outcall service from her desk.
- One employee was caught renting the corporate IP address to hacker friends to generate DOS (denial of service hacker) attacks.
While these scenarios seem outrageous, they are not uncommon. According to a survey outlined in the Seattle Times, of 294 U.S. firms with 1,000 or more employees, almost one-third of companies have fired an employee in the last 12 months for violating email policies, and 52 percent of companies said they have disciplined an employee for violating email rules in the past year.
As an employer, educating your employees as to what they can and cannot do through an acceptable use policy is simply not enough.
If the requirements are not enforced, employees will accidentally (or intentionally) violate your rules. That’s why every company should look at investing in a good email and web filtering system.
Just having it in place will act as a deterrent for such activities, and if something really is going on — like an employee leaking confidential information to a competitor or sending racial or sexist jokes through your company’s email —you’ll be able to nip it in the bud before it comes back and bites you in the form of a lawsuit.
Additionally, a good web filter will prevent employees from accessing inappropriate material online, wasting time on non-work related activities, downloading viruses and spyware, and using up company bandwidth to download photos and music.
Software such as Spectorsoft monitor employee Internet usage, accumulating statistics about how much time is spent on certain web pages, logging sites visited, and can block sites based on keywords, addresses, or time of day.
If you would like our help in choosing and setting up an acceptable use policy and a web filtering system for your company, call us at: (734) 457-5000 or send an email message to at info@expertsmi.com.