Nearly three quarters (71%) of employees admit to using internet-based email programmes to send confidential information behind their employer's backs, revealed a survey from software specialist Orchestria.
It said many of the respondents admitted to using internet-based email programmes, such as Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail, to send themselves confidential information which they though would be useful when moving to a new job.
The survey also revealed that:
· Half (49%) of respondents had accidentally sent an email to the wrong recipient
· Almost a fifth of these accidental emails (16%) had consequences, the most extreme including the loss of business customers and formal warnings, the lighter being “sheer entertainment value for the recipient”.
· Over half of the employees surveyed (58%) admitted to using work email rather than personal email to communicate with their friends, though almost a quarter (23%) said that they also used instant messaging.
Orchestria develops software solutions that provide real-time visibility and control of email. It said that its active policy management (APM) solution focuses on the content of information exchanged, rather than simply blocking access to certain sites.
Orchestria founder and chief executive Pete Malcolm, said: “Blocking websites by address is fundamentally flawed, as it requires a list of many thousands of unauthorised sites to be constantly maintained.
“Even if a company does go down this route, a determined user can easily set up his own Website, which is very unlikely to be included in the unauthorised list, because it isn't known.
“Furthermore, blocking sites by address prevents legitimate activity at those sites, particularly a problem where webmail is just one of the functions provided by a given site.”
