Employees Consistently Abuse E-Mail

Mirapoint and Radicati Group conducted a survey on corporate e-mail usage to understand how employees use their e-mail at work. The study, “Corporate E-Mail User Habits,” discovered that 23 percent of all messages in respondent’s corporate mailboxes are non-work related in nature. When coupled with data from an April 2005 survey that found that approximately 33 percent of corporate e-mail is spam, the study revealed that more than half of corporate e-mail messages are not work related.

“It is no secret that employees use their corporate e-mail for personal matters, but the specific level was unknown,” said Marcel Nienhuis, market analyst at the Radicati Group. “These results indicate that personal use of corporate e-mail may be higher than employers expect, representing a potentially significant loss in productivity.”

The report also revealed that 72 percent of respondents forward jokes, photos, video clips and other non-work related messages via corporate e-mail to co-workers. Only 28 percent of respondents claim to “never” misuse corporate e-mail in this manner. Moreover, 12 percent of users acknowledge sharing music files via corporate e-mail which violates copyright laws, occupies server storage and eats large amounts of bandwidth.

With 97 percent of respondents indicating they have a personal e-mail account, 25 percent of them admitted to regularly forwarding company e-mail messages to personal accounts and a whopping 62 percent of respondents send business e-mail from their personal e-mail accounts. Reasons for this may be as innocuous as staying on the job during an e-mail outage or as nefarious as avoiding a paper trail with their corporate e-mail account. With messages sent and stored outside of the company firewalls, businesses lose the ability to monitor where these messages are sent, how long they are kept and how the information contained in the messages is used. Businesses also cannot enforce policies on intellectual property leakage or customer and employee privacy, creating a liability issue.

“Most employees do not mean harm when using business e-mail,” said Bethany Mayer, chief marketing officer at Mirapoint. “Despite good intentions, employees may unwittingly expose sensitive company information via working with their personal e-mail, underscoring the need for greater outbound e-mail filtering and policy enforcement.”

Technology Can Instantly Authenticate E-Mail

Green Armor Solutions (www.greenarmor.com) has released Identity Cues for E-Mail, an innovative system that protects against online scams by making obvious whether the sender of an e-mail message is truly the party it claims to be.

With Identity Cues for E-Mail, end-users continue to send, receive, and read e-mail the way they always have. All messages sent from an entity using Identity Cues for E-Mail will contain a simple visual cue that allows e-mail recipients to recognize instantly whether a message received is, in fact, genuine. Users do not have to enroll in any new service, download or install any software, make any configuration changes, or carry any physical devices. Identity Cues for E-Mail is also easy for organizations to implement and requires virtually no ongoing maintenance.

Users of online banking have lost billions of dollars to scams in which they are tricked into following instructions in e-mail messages that appear to come from legitimate financial institutions, but that were really sent by criminals seeking to obtain sensitive information. Some victims of such fraud have even had their identities stolen. With Identity Cues for E-Mail in place, however, even novices can quickly and easily recognize whether messages they receive are legitimate — and not fall victim to phishing and other online scams.

Identity Cues for E-Mail is simple to implement and to maintain and sports a low total cost of ownership. It is delivered as server software that adds easy-to-recognize visual cues to e-mail messages sent from an organization to its customers or employees. The cues — which are different for each individual user — are displayed to the recipient at the beginning of e-mail messages, and prove to the user that the sender is truly the party that it claims to be. Cues are generated using sophisticated underlying technology (invisible to users) that ensures that criminals cannot generate the correct cues for any particular user. Users who receive a phishing e-mail will not see their cues and will quickly realize that the message is not authentic.

New Intrusion Prevention System

TippingPoint, a division of 3Com, has launched the TippingPoint X505, the first integrated security platform built on Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) technology, combining a stateful inspection firewall, IPSec VPN, bandwidth management, web content filtering and dynamic routing. The new platform meets the growing demand of enterprise customers to have a more complete security solution that provides preemptive, automatic and dynamic protection not found in other firewalls.

As technologies converge, organizations require an integrated security platform, such as the TippingPoint X505, which adds intelligence into the network by performing total packet flow inspection to block malicious traffic, throttle non-essential traffic and prioritize mission-critical traffic regardless of the type of traffic inspected: voice, data or video. In addition, organizations have increased the complexity, management and cost of their network by deploying multiple solutions in the network. The TippingPoint X505 is the industry’s first comprehensive enterprise solution that significantly reduces the administrative, financial and management burden of multiple point solutions while also making it affordable for enterprise perimeter, remote branch offices and medium-sized businesses to have best-of-breed security in one device.