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By Simon Heron, NetworkBox
At Network Box, we scan and monitor URLs as part of our managed service for the companies we work with, putting us in a great position to track trends in which sites are most visited at work, and which ones use the most corporate bandwidth.
Why worry about what employees do on the Internet during their breaks at work? Businesses need to protect their bandwidth. Run low on bandwidth and you'll soon be unable to download content. Our latest figures reveal.
Add Facebook, which uses another 5 percent of bandwidth, and 15 percent of available corporate bandwidth is used by Web sites that are probably not being used for business purposes.
Malware is another issue that businesses could face when they permit their employees to use social networking sites. In our sample, Facebook alone received over 1 billion hits from people at work between April and June 2010. This represents a significant risk of corporate networks coming into contact with viruses and phishing attacks on the site.
Of course, some businesses may encourage social network use for business reasons, in which case measures need to be taken to ensure that network security is not compromised. However, Google, which is the second-most visited Web site whilst at work -- and probably for work-related purposes -- has been suffering a malware problem of its own with malicious links appearing in the search results.
It's abundantly clear that managers need to ensure that business networks are fully protected against internet threats. This means:
- Staying on top of the latest trends in online communication, to know what security is required.
- Implementing and enforcing an Internet usage policy.
- Educating employees about the risks that they are likely to encounter online.
- Budgeting for expert advice, training, personnel and solutions to keep the network protected 24/7.
The survey tracked 14 billion URLs and 225,000 GB of bandwidth usage between April and June 2010. The top five Web sites (by the number of hits) visited from business addresses in Q2 2010 were:
1. Facebook -- 7.2%
2. Google -- 3.9%
3. Yimg (Yahoo's image server) -- 2.9%
4. Yahoo -- 2.3%
5. Doubleclick -- 1.6%
The top five Web sites ranked by the bandwidth they use were:
1. YouTube -- 10.2%
2. Facebook -- 5%
3. Windows Updates -- 3.2%
4. Yimg (Yahoo's image server) -- 2.9%
5. Google -- 2.5%
This article was published by Infosec Island.
Simon Heron is an Internet security analyst with NetworkBox (UK) Ltd, a unified threat management company.
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