Public Servant Lifestyle

The findings of a global threat report on web filtering and spyware reveals interesting differences in workplace internet use in the UK and US of A.

ScanSafe – the organisation who commissioned the report - found that more than one in 50 web pages requested by employees while at work were house hunting or job search web sites, representing a potentially ‘significant’ drain on productivity. In both the UK and the US, visits to house hunting related sites outnumbered visits to job search sites. However, beyond this similarity significant differences in Web usage emerged.

Specifically, the report found that:

Workers in the UK are six times more likely to use the internet to visit estate agency sites to buy or rent a home than their US counterparts. In total, the company processed approximately 72 million web requests for house hunting related sites in August 2006.

US workers are six times more likely to use the Web to look for a new job than their counterparts in the UK. The company reported it processed approximately 3.5 million Web requests for job search sites in August 2006.

UK workers are twice as likely to visit wedding-related sites during the work day as US workers.

“Getting married, finding a job and looking for a home are three major life-changing events and it’s interesting to see how these impact work habits between the two cultures,” said Eldar Tuvey, CEO and co-founder, ScanSafe. He added that the differences in Web usage to find a home, for example, may reflect the recent cooling-off of the US housing market.

Bigger Picture?

“The bigger picture is that businesses need to develop an Internet acceptable use policy and have a web security solution in place that can effectively enforce it. Uncontrolled, non-work related surfing at the office not only consumes bandwidth and lowers productivity, but exposes corporate networks to Web viruses, spyware and other mailware that can compromise proprietary information,” Tuvey said.

Acording to the report authors approximately 26% of ScanSafe’s own corporate customer base blocks access to job sites while 20% restricts access to property and house hunting sites.

The findings also also indicate that web viruses increased 23% in the same period while spyware and adware decreased 12%. The company blocked 238 unique viruses during the month, 34% of which were new unique viruses encountered and blocked for the first time. Of these the Trojan-Clicker.HTML.Agent.a accounted for the largest single percentage of web viruses blocked. Zero-hour threats — attacks that appear before an anti-virus signature is available — accounted for 13% of all Web-viruses blocked by the organisation in the survey period.

Trojan-Clicker.HTML.Agent.a, first detected in February, redirects infected machines to specified advertisement web sites, resulting in unwanted pop-up advertisements and banners displayed on the infected machine and thereby generating high hit counts on those specified web sites as part of its advertising agenda. Upon execution, the Trojan displays a blank Web page to hide its actual content and attempts to bypass pop-up blocker applications, such as those from Norton Internet Security and Internet Explorer. It also adds the PayPopUpAds cookie so that it can track users’ browsing habits.

“Many web viruses linger for months and sometimes years, like a nagging cough,” Tuvey said. “As a result, businesses need to deploy multi-layered anti-virus protection that can block viruses, both old viruses and zero-hour threats, before they reach the corporate network.”

Lifestyle readers might also be interested in the following feature: 'Downloading = Workplace IT Mayhem' in our 'Home Electrics' section.

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