Are you an employer? Are your employees working or surfing?

Millions of dollars are lost every year in lost productivity and the numbers are growing as more and more companies provide internet access to their employees as a tool in doing their job. Many employees abuse that privilege by surfing, emailing friends, shopping and so on.

The average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per day, not counting lunch, according to the Salary.com and AOL report. That converts in over $10,000 in lost productivity per year for each employee!

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By Ed Frauenheim Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: July 11, 2005, 1:52 PM PDT

Traipsing around the Internet is the most popular form of loafing on the job. The insurance industry is particularly rife with goofing off, and Missouri is the top state for time-wasters.

Those are among the conclusions of a study on wasted time at work released Monday by compensation specialist Salary.com and Web portal America Online. Through a Web survey involving more than 10,000 employees, the report found that personal Internet surfing ranked as the top method of cooling one's heels at work. It was cited by 44.7 percent of respondents as their primary time-wasting activity, followed by socializing with co-workers (23.4 percent) and conducting personal business (6.8 percent). The average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per day, not counting lunch, according to the report. That's far more time than the roughly one hour per day employers expect the average employee to waste, the report said. The extra unproductive time adds up to $759 billion annually in salaries for which companies get no apparent benefit, the report said. Average hours wasted per person, per day, were highest in the insurance industry, at 2.5 hours per day. The public sector (excluding education) was second at 2.4 hours per day, followed by research & development at 2.3 hours a day. The "Software & Internet" industry ranked fifth, at 2.2 hours a day. Those in Missouri wasted an average of 3.2 hours per day, per person, according to the report. Indiana ranked second at 2.8 hours per day.

By Mary Lorenz, CareerBuilder.com writer

Some people need their daily YouTube fix even more than they need their 10 a.m. coffee break. If you’re browsing the Web on company time looking for the latest in viral videos, you’re not alone. A new MSN-Zogby survey of 3,800 office employees nationwide reveals that engaging in non-work related activity at the office is far from uncommon. Making 9-to-5 the new primetime One-in-five office workers (21 percent) responding to the poll stated they have watched TV online – for reasons unrelated to work – while on the job. Results showed that younger workers (those aged 18 to 29) were more likely to engage in recreational online TV viewing than older office workers were. Moreover, where 23 percent of men have taken part in this behavior, only 17 percent of women have done the same. Although watching TV on company time may be questionable behavior, some workers are engaging in far more dubious activities. Six percent of office workers admit they’ve looked at pornography on their work computer. Employees with less than $25,000 in household incomes are most likely to have viewed pornography for entertainment at work. Men also outnumber women, with 10 percent of men – as opposed to 1 percent of women – looking at pornography. Minding their own business More than a third of workers (38 percent) have looked for new jobs online while at work. Half of those with $25,000 to $35,000 in household income admit to job hunting on company time – the most of any household income level. Nearly half (49 percent) of workers aged 18 to 29 are also guilty of job hunting while at work. Forty-two percent of workers who live in large cities have searched for other employment on the job, followed by 38 percent of small citydwellers, then 36 percent of suburbanites and, finally, 28 percent of workers living in rural areas.

By Beth Schultz, Network World, 03/19/07

The toughest security problem is the insider attack. These emerging tools promise to eliminate the threat

A disgruntled employee here, a careless one there, and just about any enterprise can find itself facing a mountain of trouble from confidential information made public. Help is at hand. Armed with increasingly sophisticated outbound-content monitors, information security officers finally have the weapons they need to conquer the threat of data leakage. Outbound-content monitoring - also known as data- or information-leakage prevention - came of age in the past year. The devices "have reached a state where they can be a fundamental part of everyone's network," says Josh Levine, managing director at Kita Capital Management, former CTO at E*Trade Financial and board member for device start-up Securify. Scott Mackelprang, vice president of security and compliance for Digital Insight, an online banking services company in Calabasas, Calif. (now part of Intuit), agrees.

Identity Theft More Often an Inside Job

Old Precautions Less Likely to Avert Costly Crime, Experts Say

You can take all the steps you want to protect yourself against identity theft: Guard your wallet, shred your personal financial papers before throwing them in the trash, monitor your credit reports. But no matter how careful you are, you may not be able to avoid having your identity assumed by someone who wants to go on a buying spree, using your credit card, bank account, Social Security number or other personal data. That's because the nature of identity theft has changed and the threat today is more likely than ever to come from insiders -- employees with access to large financial databases who can loot personal accounts -- than from a thief stealing a wallet or pilfering your mail. Banks, companies that take credit cards and credit-rating bureaus themselves don't do enough to protect consumers, critics say. "You can spend a lot of time and money trying to protect yourself," obtaining copies of your credit reports every three to six months, buying a credit-monitoring service to alert you when someone is making inquiries about your account or even buying identity-theft insurance, said Robert Gellman, a D.C. privacy consultant. "You can do as much as you can do, but it won't stop you from being a victim. There's nothing I'm aware of that will guarantee you not become a victim." That fact was underscored last week when federal prosecutors announced that they had arrested and charged three people in connection with a scheme to steal the personal financial information of 30,000 Americans by downloading data from a computer and selling it to scam artists. The prosecutors said it was the largest case of identity fraud ever detected. "There is a shift by identity thieves from going after single individuals to going after a mass amount of information," said Joanna Crane, identity-fraud program manager at the Federal Trade Commission. "There's an awful lot of bribery of insiders going on." Law enforcement experts now estimate that half of all such cases come from thefts of business databanks as more and more information is stored in computers that aren't properly safeguarded. Security experts said the arrests illustrate how vulnerable business databases have become. "Most companies aren't putting in the proactive steps," said Doug Barbin, a computer forensics consultant at Guardent Inc., a security firm. "It's seen as extraneous. Until it bites you, there's no incentive to do it." National bank regulators have estimated that there are now half a million cases of identity theft a year. Privacy experts who specialize in identity theft say the number could be twice as high. What is clear is that it's a growing problem.

Network Optimization
Recreational use of enterprise network resources is soaring. Employees’ instant messaging, downloading of music and video, and visiting social networking sites and news/sports sites are impacting the performance of business-critical applications–despite the fact that most organizations have policies in place to limit recreational use. A study conducted at the recent NetQoS annual network performance-management technology conference says such recreational use is a problem on more than 60 percent of networks. The survey canvassed the views of more than 150 network engineers, managers and IT directors within large enterprises, strategic integrators and government agencies who attended. “While focus in this area has typically been dedicated to employee productivity and IT security, recreational IT use, and particularly the increasing popularity of bandwidth-heavy Web 2.0 services, is now an important network-management consideration,” explains Steve Harriman, vice president of marketing at NetQoS. According to the survey, recreational use is consuming an increasing proportion of network bandwidth, with 73 percent of respondents saying that more than 10 percent of network capacity is consumed by employees’ recreational use. More than 50 percent of respondents have seen an increase in recreational use over the last year, with 55 percent of those networks experiencing an increase of more than 25 percent. Alongside growing recreational use, other trends causing performance issues include the increasing complexity and volume of application data, IT convergence, consolidation, and the rising number of remote users accessing the corporate network.