With Australia now in the middle of National Consumer Fraud Week, there’s been a timely warning issued by one company that businesses are being exposed to security risks by the increasing number of employees accessing personal emails and social networking sites while at work.

Jeremy Hulse, Marshal8e6’s vice president sales for Asia Pacific, said that last year, global spam emails exceeded 150 billion messages per day and as much as 33 percent of the emails included links to sites hosting malicious code.

“This represents a very serious threat to confidential information, compliance and network availability; three components that are essential to corporate reputation and effective business operation.

“Consumers are increasingly bringing their personal methods of communicating – such as Facebook, instant messenger or Hotmail – into the workplace with or without permission.”
 
Hulse warned that as the line continued to blur between personal and professional networking, it was important for organisations to consider social networking and personal email sites in their broader security strategy.

“There are some simple steps that organisations can follow to ensure employees can continue to build their professional relationships without increasing security risks to the organisation.”
 
According to Hulse, organisations can protect themselves from the risks of fraudulent email or web-based threats by following a number of steps, including adopting a policy-driven approach to security, matching security requirements with policy, staying on top of employee operating environments, being wary of free Web services, and updating content filtering solutions to keep spam out.