Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Nearly half of web traffic that passes through corporate infrastructure is
not related to work activities, according to a new study. The research
carried out by web security firm ScanSafe found that 49 per cent of traffic
that employees generated concerned mostly gambling, music downloads, porn
and people checking their webmail. The authors of the report said that of
traffic blocked by the company's filtering service, 14 per cent were for
advertising and promotion, 12 per cent were to online chat sites and instant
messaging applications. The company also found that blocks to gambling sites
were up 22 per cent on last year's figures. "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, product
strategy vice president at ScanSafe. The company reported that 24 new types
of malware targeting IM applications surfaced in February, 54 per cent of
these threats targeted MSN, compared to 21 per cent that affected Yahoo
Messenger and 17 per cent that affected AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). MSN
continues to be the most targeted platform for malware. But the study found
that there was a marginal decline in malware in February. Web viruses
remained virtually unchanged in February after growing 27 per cent in
January. Spyware and adware fell 2 per cent in February compared to a 26 per
cent increase the previous month. "Attackers know that malware may have a
better chance of being propagated following the New Year when many users are
returning from the holiday and haven't patched their PCs," said Nadir. "This
seasonality usually corrects itself and we tend to see a steady increase in
malware, particularly spyware, as the year progresses."