14 DAY TRIAL // A study on employees from firms in 11 countries have found that workers ignore healthy security policies and access adult content from company devices.
The protection of the company network depends greatly on the behavior of the workers, and in a security-aware organization, there are strong policies regarding the online resources that can be accessed while connected to the internal infrastructure as well as the devices used in the process.
Chinese employees lead at accessing adult content
However, a study with 1,580 participants commissioned by Blue Coat shows that the rules are deliberately disregarded, putting at risk both personal and corporate data.
Cybercriminals breaching a corporate network can start using it immediately to move laterally, store it for future use or sell it on unground marketplaces.
Smutty websites are a known risk because they are a common place for hiding malicious content; nevertheless, 19% of the surveyed employees from China, 10% in Mexico and 9% in the UK access them, ignoring security policies and cyber risks, the study found.
Risky employee behavior lowers company security
Other dangerous practices on the company network are downloading attachments from unknown senders and using unapproved apps or social media sites without permission. The obvious risk in these cases is phishing.
“Cyber criminals continuously conduct extensive research on employees’ social profiles to find information that can be used to attack organizations,” Blue Coat says in the report results.
26% of the individuals interviewed for the study admitted to using new applications without the consent of the IT department, although most of the total number of respondents understood this as being a cyber-security risk.
Accessing social networks at work for personal purposes is also a popular practice, as 41% of the employees do it. Blue Coat says that the danger rising from this is to follow shortened links that point to malware.
“Obvious behaviors such as opening emails from unverified senders still happen at work. Nearly one third (29 percent) of Chinese employees open email attachments from unverified senders, even though nearly three out of four (72 percent) see it as a serious risk. US businesses view the threat even more seriously (80 percent) and open less unsolicited emails (17 percent),” the study reveals.