Half of all web traffic (49%) in the workplace is
non-productive, including gambling, music, porn and web
mail.
In its monthly
Global Threat
Report, ScanSafe, which provides on-demand web security to
firms, said its web filtering blocks were up 8% last month when
compared to January.
The company reported that 14% of blocks were for advertising and
promotion, 12% of blocks were to chat and instant messaging (IM)
sites, and 10% of blocks were for web mail.
In addition, music, gambling and porn sites each accounted for 4%
of blocks, and blocks to gambling sites were up 22% over
January.
“Beyond the negative impact on productivity, uncontrolled use of
the web can have serious and costly consequences for businesses of
all sizes, including exposure to legal liability, disclosure of
confidential information, breaches of compliance requirements and
unnecessary bandwidth consumption,” said Dan Nadir, vice president
for product strategy at ScanSafe.
ScanSafe also reported that it blocked 24 new IM threats in
February, 54% of which affected MSN Messenger compared to 21% that
affected Yahoo! AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was affected by 17% of
the threats.
The latest ScanSafe Global Threat Report is based on real-time
analysis of more than six billion web requests and more than 12
million web threats scanned by the company in February.
Blended security threats spiral
Comment on this article:
computer.weekly@rbi.co.uk