Employee Use Of Social Networking Sites In The Workplace Increases Risk

SYDNEY, Australia, 31 October, 2007 – MessageLabs, a leading provider of integrated messaging and web security services to businesses worldwide, today revealed new data showing a 61 percent increase in the number of threats to Australian businesses from malicious ‘drive-by’ websites appearing on the Internet.

These websites, hosting virus or Trojan code, can appear and disappear within 24 to 48 hours, making it impossible for traditional signature-based software solutions to detect and classify the threats. Globally, the number of new, unclassified sites harbouring malware, spyware or adware jumped from 688 blocked per day in September to 1088 per day in October. Furthermore, 64 percent of all web viruses blocked were classified in this category, up from 59.2 percent in September.

Andrew Antal, Marketing Director, Asia Pacific at MessageLabs said, “Everybody is talking about the Internet and the transition of the web from a collection of websites to a fully-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. It’s not just about email anymore and cyber criminals know it. Targeted attacks that use multiple vectors are the order of the day. Attacks have evolved into something more sophisticated – the bad guys have moved to web-threat 2.0.”

Employees are adopting consumer technologies in the workplace like never before. There has been a huge increase in employee visits to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace while at work. MessageLabs is able to track attempted visits to Facebook through its URL filtering service. In the Asia Pacific region for the month of September, the number of page requests for Facebook blocked through MessageLabs URL web filtering in SMBs accounted for 22 percent of all page requests blocked under the category Personals and Dating. For MessageLabs Enterprise customers, the number jumped to 37 percent.

Antal said, “This year, we’ve seen adware distributors use the popular Facebook and MySpace platforms to infect unprotected PCs with spyware. While most workers know not to open emails from dubious sources, many don’t realise they could put their corporate network at risk by visiting a website they trust.”

Earlier this year, Australian sites such as those for the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Sydney Opera House were hacked leaving visitors open to infection by a Trojan.

Antal said, “The challenge for IT departments is to keep up with their employees. IT Managers walk the fine line between giving employees freedom to use the Internet while also protecting them and the corporate network.”

MessageLabs Web Security service helps keep organisations safe by protecting them from known and unknown web-based malicious code threats and malware. The service provides multi-layered protection combining best of breed technology with MessageLabs own proprietary technology called Skeptic.

MessageLabs URL Filtering is highly configurable, keeping organisations productive, enforcing acceptable use policies for web browsing and facilitating relevant regulatory and legislative compliance by monitoring and controlling Internet content into and out of the organisation.


About MessageLabs

MessageLabs is a leading provider of integrated messaging and web security services, with over 19,000 clients ranging from small business to the Fortune 500 located in more than 86 countries. MessageLabs provides a range of managed security services to protect, control, encrypt and archive communications across Email, Web and Instant Messaging.

These services are delivered by MessageLabs globally distributed infrastructure and supported 24/7 by security experts. This provides a convenient and cost-effective solution for managing and reducing risk and providing certainty in the exchange of business information. For more information, please visit www.messagelabs.com.

Media Contacts:

US:
Marissa Vicario, MessageLabs, +1 646 519 8116, mvicario@messagelabs.com,
Hill & Knowlton for MessageLabs, +1 212-885-0552, messagelabs@hillandknowlton.com

EMEA:
Paul Wood, MessageLabs, +44 (0) 1452 627705, pwood@messagelabs.com
Weber Shandwick for MessageLabs, +44 (0) 20 7067 0500, mlukpr@webershandwick.com

APAC:
Andrew Antal, MessageLabs, +61 2 8208 7171, aantal@messagelabs.com
Spectrum Communications for MessageLabs, +61 2 9954 3299, messagelabs@spectrumcomms.com.au