1 in 5 Oz employees being sacked over leaking company secrets on emails

Melbourne, June 3: An increasing number of employees are getting sacked for leaking company secrets via email, reveals a new survey.

The Proofpoint/Forrester survey has revealed that one in five businesses terminated an employee for email breaches in the past year.

Almost 23 per cent of Australian respondents admitted that their business had suffered due to disclosure of sensitive or embarrassing data in the past year.

Proofpoint regional head Gerry Tucker revealed that 62 per cent of respondents listed corporate email as the main avenue for data leakage; 18 per cent were more concerned about web-based email; 15 per cent cited other messaging systems; and 5 per cent mentioned blogs and message boards.

"Some organisations have banned the use of webmail at work but, in reality, most have no ability to enforce usage policies due to the limitations of their technology," News.com.au quoted him, as saying.

"Webmail and blogs are growing in importance as business tools, and companies will want to use them in a secure setting," he added.

The survey also revealed that forty-two per cent of the respondents said their email security systems did not allow adequate reporting for policy enforcement purposes.

"To a large extent, companies don't know what data is going out of their environment," said Tucker.

MessageLabs Australia manager Andrew Antal also said that 34 per cent of local IT managers consider employees' inappropriate use of the web was their biggest security threat.

A research by Galaxy for MessageLabs showed that email policies are not "actively enforced", even though 90 per cent are monitoring web usage by staff.

ANI