Illegal Internet Activity a Growing Concern for Enterprise Organizations

8e6 Technologies recently conducted a competition with more than 500 IT professionals to find the most outlandish Internet usage by employees and understand the challenges that enterprise IT professionals face in controlling employee Internet use. With the help of Internet filtering and reporting tools, the competition showed egregious employee Internet abuse by an increasing number of corporate employees abusing the Internet for personal gain and putting their organizations at risk of legal liability.

In response to the inquiry regarding the most serious infractions of a company’s Internet Acceptable Use Policy by its employees, we received numerous outlandish real-world anecdotes.

Corporate Crime through the Internet continues to grow inside the enterprise network and emphasizes the need to strictly enforce Internet Acceptable Use policies through filtering and reporting tools. 

• One employee had corporate-provided Internet access at home and added a simple wireless router and switches to resell Internet access to his neighbors.
• Another rogue employee set up wireless routers throughout the office; opening up security holes throughout the network.
• One employee had downloaded a huge amount of prohibited content such as videos, MP3 files and movies to his workstation. He then set up an internal media server to the rest of the company in order to “save” bandwidth. 
• Another employee brought in his personal laptop, plugged it into the government network and was running a personal auction site selling government property.
• One employee used the corporate network to give his family and friends access to the company IP PBX so they could make free Internet phone calls overseas.
• Yet another employee was using a workstation to participate in an illegal movie distribution ring.

Sexual Harassment lawsuit written all over it – The largest segment of respondents cited employee searches for pornography as the most significant abuse of Internet Acceptable Use policies. A majority of the stories involved employees viewing and sending pornography to other employees, thereby elevating legal liabilities for their employers.

• One employee was using company bandwidth to run his own porn site from the office. Not only was the employee using corporate resources, but after hours he would sneak models into the office and have them pose on the office furniture, including his boss’s office!
• A male employee closed his door to run his personal online live sex show during work hours.  
• Another male employee was discovered putting up nude photos of himself. The employee was 5’5” and over 400 pounds!
• An executive at one organization was downloading and viewing an offensive Web site and complained to the IT administrator that it was taking too long.
• One employee was surfing porn Web sites, downloading pictures and then forwarding them to his colleagues. 

Where will it all end? More egregious misbehavior is captured in the following examples.

• An employee downloaded 1 gig of MP3s, stored them on the corporate server and burned those CDs with internal hardware and then sold them to other employees.
• Another employee ran a competitive business with his company-provided laptop and desktop, in addition to a large-scale pornography Web site – all through company resources!