5. Surfing Gambling, Porn, or Other Legally-risky Sites
One of the oldest abuses of corporate Internet links, the downloading of porn, gambling and other objectionable data is another still-popular activity that falls into the "I thought we had that fixed" category.
Most companies today have established that such content, even when technically legal for consumers, could create a hostile working environment for employees, subjecting the company to legal or punitive action. Any human resources department will tell you that these pursuits are a major no-no, and most IT professionals will tell you that they have deployed some sort of content filter to restrict access to objectionable content.
However, the problem still runs rampant in some organizations. In fact, an investigation of the U.S. Department of the Interior published last month turned up some alarming data regarding the online surfing habits of its 80,000 employees.
In a study of one week's worth of computer logs, the U.S. Office of the Inspector General (OIG) discovered over one million log entries in which 7,763 DOI computer users spent more than 2,004 hours accessing game and auction sites. Extrapolated over the course of a year, these shopping and gaming binges could account for 104,221 hours of lost productivity -- more than $2,027,887 in lost costs, the OIG said.
The OIG found that a significant number of employees were accessing pornographic sites, many for periods of 30 minutes to an hour. Four employees were found to have downloaded egregious volumes of pornography, including child pornography, and each was prosecuted and sentenced for anywhere from 10 months to eight years in jail.
The DOI had implemented Website monitoring and blocking software, but users were still able to get around it, the OIG said. In a final spot check of the DOI systems in August, OIG investigators were able to access both pornographic and gambling sites on three of the department's four main computer systems, despite the presence of content filtering and blocking tools.
Online gambling and pornographic sites also are "becoming a frequent source of infection via drive-by downloads and zero-day exploits," observes Richard Stiennon, president of IT-Harvest.
