Watch those inboxes
Workers are increasingly fired for "leaking" company secrets via email, according to an Australian survey by Proofpoint/Forrester (via Australian IT).
The survey found one in five (23 percent) of Australian businesses fired an employee for email-related grievances in the past year, citing harm to their businesses due to the public exposure of embarrassing or proprietary company data.
Major avenues for data leakage included:
- Corporate email (cited by 62 percent of respondents)
- Web-based email (18 percent of respondents)
- "Other messaging systems" (15 percent)
- Blogs and message boards (five percent)
42 percent of respondents found their email security systems lacked adequate reporting capabilities for policy enforcement.
The number of organizations disciplining employees for breaches of email conduct is approaching 50 percent, said regional head Gerry Tucker of Proofpoint.
Tucker said that while it is difficult to gauge the "cost" of harm resulting from leaked email data, the disciplinary process — including an investigation and termination — can be large.
"It's a fair assumption that someone is not going to do all that unless the breach has been serious," he said.
Andrew Antal of MessageLabs Australia found 34 percent of local IT managers consider inappropriate use of the web to be the company's biggest security threat. What's more, email policies are not "actively enforced," despite web use monitoring across 90 percent of companies.
