Survey: 1 in 5 employee e-mails poses a legal risk
What technology creates the biggest legal and financial risks for employers? Hint: It’s something most employees use multiple times a day.
That’s right: e-mail. Outgoing messages containing confidential, offensive or otherwise embarrassing content are increasingly causing big problems for organizations.
In the past 12 months, 44% of U.S. companies have had to investigate a violation of e-mail policy that posed a legal or financial risk, according to a recent survey by data security firm Proofpoint. Those situations most commonly involved:
- Obscene and offensive adult content (28%)
- Confidential information about the company (27%)
- Personal data about employees or customers (20%), and
- Intellectual property or trade secrets (12%).
More than a quarter of companies have fired an employee for one of those e-mail blunders.
And the companies that didn’t perform any investigations weren’t necessarily safe, either. The companies surveyed estimated that, on average, almost one in five (19%) outgoing e-mails sent at work contain potentially dangerous content.
New technology, new threats
It isn’t just e-mail that’s creating problems for employers — other types of technology are to blame for the leak of information. In the past year:
- 21% of companies have suffered a confidential data exposure through an employee’s use of a blog or online message board, and
- 12% have had an employee post dangerous content to a social networking site.
Ways to protect your company
Minimizing those threats requires cooperation between HR and IT. Here are some specific steps employers can take:
- Create policies – The first step toward protection is to tell employees what they’re prohibited from writing in e-mails or posting online.
- Discipline when you have to – One reason employees continue to write things they shouldn’t is they aren’t aware they can be punished or fired for it. That’s why it’s key to consistently deal with policy violations when they’re uncovered.
- Monitor outgoing e-mail – Many organizations install software to flag messages with certain keywords or periodically audit outgoing messages. Some larger companies hire full-time staff to read and analyze employees’ e-mail. Whichever method is used, it’s important for IT to be aware of what’s leaving the e-mail system.
- Search for blogs and other sites – One strategy for finding employees’ blog posts and other online writing is to plug your organization’s name into a search engine and look through the results.
A full report of the survey is available here (registration required).
Comments
One Comment on Survey: 1 in 5 employee e-mails poses a legal risk
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Carrie2 on
Fri, 6th Feb 2009 5:42 am
Adding this to my bookmarks. Thank You
