Home workers "surf twice as much smut"

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 17 Apr 2008 at 10:22

Remote workers using laptops at home visit porn sites two and a half times more often than office-bound employees, according to security firm ScanSafe.

The analysis of eight billion web requests also found that home workers were more than five times more likely to visit "extreme websites" containing "graphic content", and four times more likely to visit sites containing illegal activity, such as bomb making.

"It's a very gray line people out on the road seem to have," says Spencer Parker, director of product management at Scansafe. "If you're in a hotel room and you've got the corporate laptop with you, what do you do?"

ScanSafe says employers shouldn't only be worried about the downtime associated with their employees' extra-curricular activity, but also the legal and security implications.

"If employees are using a company laptop to download illegal music files from home, their bosses may be liable," claims Parker. "If FAST [Federation Against Software Theft] came into the office and scanned PCs for illegal content, the company would be liable for that.

"Staff assume their web habits away from the office are unsupervised, however, the problem is that no matter where they are working, they could be putting their company at risk."

Porn and illegal download sites are also notorious for spreading malware, raising the risk of infecting company PCs.

Yet, whilst the home workers might be wasting time on XXX sites, they're less likely to be sorting out their personal finances on company time. ScanSafe's research found that remote workers were two-thirds less likely to visit an online banking site.

"A lot of people assume that security is much better in the office than at home or at Wi-Fi hotspots," says Parker. "Also, people feel that being able to bank or shop online at work is much more acceptable nowadays as part of the overall work-life balance."