Two thirds of Irish employees would alter their online behaviour if they knew that they were being monitored by their employers.
This is one of the key findings of a survey by IT distributor DataSolutions, which also found that 17% of respondents use the same passwords for personal and work purposes. Nearly two thirds (62%) also said that they had access to social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube, from the workplace.
The survey was carried out by the Marketing Development Programme, UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School in January 2013, for DataSolutions and security giant RSA among 250 Irish office workers in relation to online behaviours and knowledge of company security policies.
The survey also rolled out the old chestnut of passwords for chocolate, with 4% ready to yield the information for a mere Mars bar, but when the stakes were raised beyond confectionary to a €20 voucher, those willing to acquiesce rose to 16%.
A worrying 32% of respondents said that they were unaware of policies in the workplace in relation to bring your own device (BYOD).
"We decided to conduct this survey following the results received from a similar survey late last year, in which 278 Irish IT managers were interviewed," said David Keating, security sales manager, DataSolutions. "In that survey we found 80% of Irish IT professionals were more concerned about the actions of careless employees than hackers. Given these results, we wanted to see how Irish employees themselves viewed IT security and there are some interesting findings.
"With 17% of employees admitting to using the same password for work and personal activities they are potentially exposing the company to a number of cyber threats. If we take for example, the LinkedIn security attack in 2012, where 6.5 million passwords were compromised, the potential risk of using the same password for personal and work activities becomes clear.
"The large percentage of employees who would change their online behaviour if they knew their employer was monitoring them, leads us to question what they are doing online. In the majority of cases we can assume it is something innocent such as accessing social networking sites. However, employees need to be aware of the potential IT security threats from their online activities and ensure they are not doing anything to compromise the integrity of the company’s network.
"In order to maintain the integrity of its information and data, organisations need to be educating employees around the importance of IT security and highlighting their responsibilities. It only takes one employee to accidentally or purposefully give away their password or misplace a mobile phone to compromise the entire company. This will have serious consequences for the organisation’s future survival."
TechCentral Reporters
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers