No sporting chance says Symantec

Gordon Peters
Thursday, 25 March 2010 11:37

IT Industry - Market

If you are in the habit of checking on the Internet to see how your sporting team is performing, or having an occasional online flutter on the horses, or some other gamble while at work, then you may be in for a rude shock.

It seems that Australian employers have had enough of this unrelated work activity and are now clamping down on their staff accessing sports and gambling-related websites while they are meant to be hard at work.

According to security firm, Symantec in its latest MessageLabs intelligence report, over the last four months, it has detected a dramatic increase in the number of instances employers have intentionally blocked staff from accessing sports-related and gambling-related websites.

Symantec's senior manager enterprise and partner services, Andrew Gordon, said today that 'either clients are choosing to block sports and gambling sites more as a company policy, or employees are visiting these sites more frequently so companies are starting to block them so that productivity isn't affected. MessageLabs Intelligence suspect it's a bit of both.'

Gordon says the number of sports category web pages blocked by Australian employers has increased from 18,000 blocks per day to nearly 50,000 blocks per day. While the number of gambling category web pages, most of which is sports-related gambling, has increased from 60,000 blocks per day to 80,000 blocks per day.

And, Symantec predicts that sports-related spam is also expected to be on the increase with the Rugby Union Super 14 season in full swing, the NRL season kick off last week and the impending 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. The security firm says it expects scammers to capitalise on the wave of excitement and expectation surrounding these events using advance fee fraud scams, also referred to as 419 scams, and spam mentioning sport-related topics to convince victims to part with their money.