Around forty percent of Australian companies surveyed said that viruses had been unleashed on their corporate networks as a direct result of their employees' Web surfing activities, according to Websense's Australian 2002 Web@Work report.
The employee Internet monitoring organisation has made some surprising recommendations to Australian companies in response to the survey.
The company today said that employees should be encouraged to use work e-mail for personal purposes, seeming to contradict company wisdom to minimise inappropriate and non-work-related use of corporate networks.
The survey singled-out personal Web mail services such as Hotmail as a major area of concern when it comes to network security, claiming that 86 percent of IT managers reported that their company's employees visit them when engaging in non-work-related Web use.
Graham Pearson, Websense South-east Asia regional sales manager, cautioned companies to give their employees an incentive not to use services like Hotmail.
"The personal e-mail sites are a great way of getting viruses into companies so there's a danger there," said Pearson.
"Really a company should allow their staff to use their work e-mail address for personal e-mails; at least they know they're covered by the anti-virus tools that they have in place".
Overall, 85 percent of companies surveyed expressed concern about their employees' Web surfing activities. However, while 40 percent of companies report security-related problems associated with employee surfing habits, the prime concerns of IT managers appear to be that the practice eats into company productivity.
Pearson concedes that the survey suggests that non-work-related Web surfing had some positive impacts on worker productivity, showing that in 94 percent of cases, employees don't leave their workplace to go the bank.
"There's always a positive and a negative side to these surveys...the negative side is that 61 percent downloaded music, 39 percent downloaded movies and 86 percent went to personal e-mail sites," said Pearson.
IT managers' second highest concerns with non-work-related Web use activity, according to the survey, are the costs they bear for excessive bandwidth consumption.
All companies have an email policy.
Simply add to it that any user who's email causes network disruptions due to virii/worm/trojan would be financially liable for the downtime.
Removing Outbreak would also be benficial.