According to a survey conducted by 8e6 Technologies (www.8e6.com), employees are using company computers and resources to conduct non-work related activities.  Some of these activities simply wasting time, but others are malicious, or threaten company security or data.

Here are some of the more extreme cases:

• One employee was caught running a gambling website and acting as a bookie for his co-workers.
• To bypass the company’s web filter, one employee was caught using his desktop computer as an FTP server for the other employees. He had downloaded and saved over 300G of material.
• One employee was busted for giving away confidential information such as price lists, contracts, and software code for application development.
• Another employee was busted for having a side business stealing and selling company inventory on eBay.
• One woman was caught running an online outcall service from her desk.
• One employee was caught renting the corporate IP address to hacker friends to generate DOS attacks.

Although these are extreme cases, many companies have fired employees for violating company policies. It’s much more common than people realize.

As an employer, if you have an Acceptable Use Policy, which is strongly recommended, it must be enforced. Simply having it may not deter employees from finding ways around it in hopes of not getting caught.

There are excellent solutions that ensure that your Acceptable Use Policy is not violated, intentionally or otherwise. these solutions offer web filtering (gaming sites, gambling, or downloading viruses), email filtering (keywords or inappropriate jokes, etc), and many other must-have features.

Give us a call and let’s talk about your network security and Acceptable Use Policy, and find ways to make sure your company’s resources aren’t being wasted by your employees.

The Conficker virus is set to activate on April 1st 2009, this could be very bad but it is unknown to what extent it will damage PC’s, to learn more inluding how to remove the infection see here:

Conficker information and removal links

ATV.ca reports on XP Antivirus 2008

The symptom may appear as a red icon in your system tray, warning of threats found on your system.  Popups and other symptoms occur also, leading the victim to purchase a full version of Antivirus 2008. Don’t be misled by a legitimate-looking message such as this one:

Unfortunately, once you have purchased it, your bank and/or credit card company will not likely issue a refund since they will not consider it fraudulent, as it’s a real merchant (may show up as any number of merchants on your credit card statement, but it seems the company that owns it is Innovagest 2000).

The following are three possibilities of eliminating this malware (and possibly others) from your system:

1. Backup your important data and bring your system back to factory default settings, apply all operating system and application installations/updates, and restore your data
2. Use eset online scanner to detect and remove malware
3. Use Malwarebytes to detect and remove malware

Many of our customers like self-help guides and information such as the above, but if you would rather one of our eNerds come to your office or home for this resolution, don’t hesitate to request service here.