Every employer is at least partially aware that their employees use company computers to do personal things, regardless of whether there is a written company policy on appropriate Internet usage. Spam blockers can be a great corporate asset in reducing the amount of damage done by employee carelessness.
Employee computer misuse can result in rendering the company server vulnerable to incoming spam and malware. An effective spam blocker can prevent this type of business risk. A quality spam blocker can detect emails that contain certain words or language, such as pornographic terms or profanity. It can also compare an incoming email to the IPs of known spammers in order to determine whether the email is legitimate.
Another important function of a spam blocker is to provide companies with an overview of incoming spam by employee. If the spam blocker indicates that 80% of the spam emails intercepted were sent to one particular employee, that information can be used to determine that the individual employee is not following corporate computer policies. This allows the employer to follow up and take action before the server is at risk.
A recent Vault.com survey revealed that 90.3% of employees polled said that they surf the web at work. The Computer Security Institute and the FBI surveyed companies and found that 78% of those surveyed reported employee Internet abuse, mostly from downloading pornography and the inappropriate use of email. This occurred whether the company had employed a spam blocker or not.
The largest danger of employees using corporate email and Internet for personal use is the unintentional harvesting of employees’ company email addresses. For example, an employee may want to receive emails from a news website while at work, and therefore provide the news site with their company email address. The address may be harvested by spammers and the corporate server could be deluged with spam. The more spam an employee receives, the higher likelihood that he or she will eventually click on malware and infect the corporate intranet.
Additionally, some spammers engage in “dictionary spamming” where, once the spammer has harvested a legitimate employee address, it will send spam messages to common names using the same naming protocol in the hopes that someone with that name works there. Dealing with this type of spam takes up significant server resources and time.
Although it is important to have clearly defined and communicated computer use policies, a company’s best defense against ever-increasing spam is an effective spam blocker.