Experts estimate that 1.5 million workers will be watching the NCAA March Madness games online from their desks, and 37.3 million workers are expected to participate in office pools. So what does this mean for employers? An overall potential $1.7 billion loss in productivity according to a study completed by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.
This year, CBSSports.com and NCAA.com are making it very easy for employees to participate in the tournament pools and watch the games online. For example, CBSSports.com has teamed up with Facebook, making it easy for Facebook users to join a pool and fill out a bracket. CBSSports.com has also launched a developer platform that allows more than 200 Web sites to provide the live video feed of the games, making it easy for employees to find and watch the games online. And just like last year, NCAA On Demand is including the "boss button," which brings up a fake spreadsheet to make it appear that employees are busy working when the boss walks by.
Besides a loss in productivity, businesses and schools are concerned that widespread viewing of the live streaming video of games by employees or students will slow or crash computer networks. This is especially worrisome because for the first time this year all 63 tournament games will be available online, without online blackouts of games showing on local CBS TV stations. As a result of the mounting concern, many businesses and schools are planning to filter the games this year to prevent employees and students from watching the videos and sucking up all the bandwidth.
With the exception of the play-in game on Tuesday, March 18, first-round games are annually played during business hours on Thursday and Friday, so organizations should begin preparing now. Businesses and schools can protect their organizations from security, bandwidth and productivity issues by monitoring and/or filtering their employees’ and students’ Web use.
Wavecrest Computing offers several Internet filtering and monitoring software products for businesses and other organizations. Their products enable employers to block and/or monitor sites by categories, e.g., sports, gambling, streaming media, spyware/malicious, social networking, etc. CBSSports.com and NCAA.com, including NCAA On Demand, are included in the Wavecrest site-blocking list under sports, but if you want to only block and/or monitor the live video, users can take advantage of one of Wavecrest’s custom categories to block and/or monitor www.ncaasports.com/mmod/player. All of Wavecrest's products come with a free 30-day trial, so organizations can download the free trial and begin filtering and monitoring Web use today.
Sources:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/sports/20080311-9999-1s11gallery.html
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/mensbasketball/2008-03-12-Streaming_N.htm
Cyber Monday and online holiday shopping could mean lost productivity for businesses this year. It is the traditional start of the online holiday shopping season, and some experts are predicting a 20% hike in online sales this year with total Internet holiday shopping sales expected to near $25 billion.
According to the job placement consulting firm, Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., of Chicago, employers could lose a total of $488 million in productivity as employees go online to do their holiday shopping.
Shop.org estimates that 68.6 million U.S. employees, or 54 percent of the workforce, will use their Internet connections at work to purchase their holiday gifts on Cyber Monday, which falls on November 26 this year. Many of the big retail stores, like Macy’s and Target, have already been planning for the day and will have one-day only specials.
Also according to Shop.org, while women are typically known to enjoy shopping more than men, it is men that are more likely to shop online from work. Adults aged 18 – 24 also fall into this category with 73 percent of them shopping online for the holidays. Overall, the Internet will influence 30 percent of holiday sales.
To protect your company against productivity losses and online security threats during the holiday season, you can monitor employees’ Internet access with one of Wavecrest’s Cyfin or CyBlock filtering and reporting software products.
Wavecrest is a ten-year industry leader in the Web-use management field and encourages companies to clearly communicate Web-use policies to their employees and then closely monitor for compliance. Wavecrest Computing’s customer base includes the U.S. Department of Justice, Procter and Gamble, London Stock Exchange, BMW, Miller Brewing Company, Citibank and many more.
Hackers are continuously looking for new ways to deliver their malicious code to computer users in order to steal private data, hijack Web transactions, or spy on users. Hackers have gotten smarter with how they deliver their malicious code by embedding it in images or disguised as a Portable Document Format (PDF).
According to Chris Rouland, the chief technology officer for IBM Corp.'s Internet Security Systems, "the next logical step seems to be the media players."
There have only been a few cases of video-related hacking. In November 2006, one of these worms was discovered. After a user opened a media file in a player, a corrupt Web site was launched without prompting. Hackers created another program that installs spyware when a video file is opened. Attackers have also tried to spread fake video links by posting them on YouTube.
Other sites that are recently the target of hackers are user-generated sites, such as social networking, blogs, and wikis.
Organizations can combat these security threats by communicating their acceptable use policies to employees and filtering and/or monitoring employee Web use. Wavecrest Computing offers several filtering and monitoring solutions to help organizations control employee Web use.
Wavecrest’s products monitor and filter Web sites by categories, e.g., spyware, social networking, streaming media, blogging, etc. By monitoring Web use, organizations can also easily identify when spyware may have been downloaded on a user’s computer as unusual patterns will begin to appear in the Web-use reports.
Sources:
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=023000SJS6V1
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,300685,00.html
A new study by McAfee found that searches for online music returned a higher percentage of risky Web sites than any other category of searches. Of the sites returned, 19.1% were considered a security risk. Searches for file sharing sites also returned a high percentage of risky Web sites. Four of the most dangerous searches on Google for file sharing sites were “bearshare,” “limeware,” “Kazaa,” and “winmx.”
This was a surprise considering that in the past pornography Web sites were always considered to be the most “risky sites.” Even though music download and file sharing sites pose a greater threat now, McAfee stated in their study that searching on adult terms is still riskier than searching on non-adult terms. They also found that searching on adult terms is producing more threatening results today than in December 2006.
What makes most of these sites dangerous is that many of them contain malicious code or spyware that is downloaded immediately when a user clicks on the infected site. In fact, a study by Symantec in September 2006 found that employees surfing the Internet poses a bigger risk to company networks than spam. This means that companies with no Web-use policy or management process to control employee Web surfing are putting their networks at a higher risk for attack.
Organizations can combat these security threats by communicating their acceptable use policies to employees and filtering and/or monitoring employee Web use. Wavecrest Computing offers several filtering and monitoring solutions to help organizations control employee Web use. As well as filtering and monitoring, Wavecrest products provide accurate and reliable reports that give organizations a clear view of their workforce’s online activity. This allows organizations to spot problem areas easily and take early corrective action.
Source: http://www.siteadvisor.com/studies/search_safety_may2007.html
In a recent study by YouGov, employees admitted to wasting about 30% of their time online each month. This equals about two work days per month. If you have 200 employees making an average of $15/ hour wasting this much time surfing the Internet each month, $576,000 in wages is being wasted each year.
The study also found that most of this time was wasted on shopping sites. Close behind shopping were news and travel sites. Men were found to be the biggest time wasters, and many of them admitted that they occasionally went to adult entertainment sites at work.
This amount of personal surfing is a big drain on workforce productivity and a major legal liability risk, especially if employees are being distracted by adult entertainment and gambling sites. Organizations can easily reduce personal Web surfing by employees by having a well-communicated Web-use policy in conjunction with Wavecrest’s Web monitoring and filtering software. Wavecrest’s products help organizations pinpoint both positive and negative Web surfing.
The 2007 NCAA men’s college basketball tournament, a.k.a. March Madness, will kick off at noon on March 15. The tournament is one of the most widely watched sporting events in the world and according to eMarketer, brings in more advertising dollars than the Super Bowl. In recent years, the event has posed some serious problems for businesses as it drains network bandwidth and workforce productivity and opens networks to threats posed by malware and viruses.
CBS SportsLine is offering its “NCAA On Demand” for free again this year, and most visitors are hitting the site during work hours. According to a report published last year by Nielsen/ NetRatings, more people visited NCAA and other sport sites during March Madness 2006 while at work rather than at home. The streaming video and real-time scores that are offered at “NCAA On Demand” and other sport sites are high bandwidth features that can slow a company’s network and cause problems for employees that are trying to be productive.
Challenger, Gray and Christmas, an employee outplacement company, estimates that March Madness costs the nation’s employers $237 million for every 13.5 minutes workers spend on the Internet. CBS is very aware that employees are visiting the site from work. They have once again included the clickable “Boss Button” that workers can use to quickly bring up a fake spreadsheet so that it appears they are working.
In addition to a drain on bandwidth and productivity, employers should be concerned about the increased security risks that come from employees surfing the Internet. A recent trend for hackers has been to attach malware, spyware, viruses, and other attacks to sports and gambling sites. Just in early February, hackers infiltrated the Miami Dolphins Stadium Web site and tried to attack its visitors. The last thing employers want is for one of their employees to surf to one of these infected sites just to place a bet or get the latest scores.
Businesses can protect themselves from these security, bandwidth and productivity issues by monitoring and/or filtering employees’ Web use. Wavecrest Computing offers four Internet monitoring and filtering software products for businesses and other organizations. Employers can block and/or monitor sites by categories, e.g., sports, gambling, streaming media, spyware/malicious, etc. “NCAA On Demand” is included in the Wavecrest URL list under sports, but if you want to only block and/or monitor the live video, users can take advantage of one of Wavecrest’s 12 custom categories to block and/or monitor www.ncaasports.com/mmod/player.
Sources:
“March Madness Major Threat to Network Security”: http://www.informationweek.com/news/
NCAA Sports On Demand: http://www.ncaasports.com/mmod
eMarketer: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004668&src=article2_newsltr
A recent report from Compete Inc. showed that MySpace was one of America’s biggest Internet time wasters. In August 2006, MySpace had 80 million registered users. It was the top site visited in 2006, and users spent about 12% of their time online at MySpace’s Web site. The report found that many of these users leave it open throughout the day so that they can immediately retrieve new messages posted by friends. This is not surprising since News Corp., who purchased the site in 2005, reported on February 8, 2007 that they have spent more than $60 million dollars in additional hardware just to handle the increased traffic.
Community colleges and businesses are making the decision to block their students and employees from using MySpace due to the amount of bandwidth that the site consumes. Lorain County Community College in Ohio just recently began blocking MySpace on their campus for this reason. Their director of Information Systems reported that the heavy MySpace use was maxing out the College’s bandwidth. The students were also using the library’s reference computers to visit their MySpace pages.
While many may think that most of MySpace users are teens and college students, according to a report from comScore Media Matrix in August 2006, half of MySpace users are 35 years or older. This means that employers also have to monitor or filter their employees’ Web use to sites that are eating up bandwidth. This way they can save bandwidth for use in business critical applications.
Wavecrest Computing offers several monitoring and filtering products to help organizations conserve bandwidth, protect their networks, and increase productivity. Wavecrest’s software products monitor and block sites by ‘content’ categories and extensions, e.g., Social Networking, IP Addresses, Gambling, etc. In addition to the standard categories, Wavecrest products include 12 additional custom categories that organizations can use to monitor or block specified Web sites.
Just last week MySpace was infected with a phishing worm that infected several user profiles, passed between users, and attached itself to video files. MySpace was forced to shut down hundreds of user profiles from its 80 million registered users.
These attacks are no surprise based on a security report released by Symantec on September 25 that found that nearly half of all computer attacks are targeting Web browsers. Because it has been more difficult to get users to open email attachments, hackers are attaching spyware and malicious code to Web sites, so when a user visits an infected site, spyware or malicious code is automatically downloaded.
These threats are especially prevalent in sites that enable information to pass quickly between users, e.g., social networking sites and blogs. In November, Wikipedia, a popular online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone, was infected with malware.
Per Anderson, IDC Denmark’s Managing Director, stated that “the risk of infection is about five times greater for companies that allow Internet usage by staff to go unhindered and unmonitored.” To reduce the risk of infection, companies need to protect themselves with accurate Web-use management software.
Filtering and/or monitoring employees’ Internet access with one of Wavecrest’s Cyfin or CyBlock software products greatly reduces the risk of security threats. With Wavecrest’s products, companies can easily filter and monitor employees’ Internet access with categories such as phishing, spyware/ malicious, social networking, blogging, etc.
Online retailers expect to see an increase in online sales for the 2006 holiday season. Online holiday sales have continued to steadily grow over the past several years. In 1999, they accounted for $5.3 billion of the season’s sales, while last year they were $26 billion. This year, the National Retail Federation expects online holiday sales to reach $32 billion. They also predict that one in four purchases will be made online.
With the steady growth of online sales, it appears that more shoppers have gotten tired of fighting crowds during the holidays. While many shoppers still get out there to get that great deal on Black Friday, some are turning to comparison shopping on the Internet. Those using the Internet will begin their shopping on Cyber Monday, the first work day following the Thanksgiving weekend. They wait for Monday to take advantage of the fast Internet service at work.
However, don’t think that Cyber Monday is the only day your employees will shop online at work. While online holiday shopping officially begins that day, the busiest online shopping day has fallen on a Monday between December 12 and 18 for the past seven years.
To protect your company against security threats and productivity losses during the holiday season, monitor employees’ Internet access with one of Wavecrest’s Cyfin or CyBlock filtering and reporting software products. Wavecrest is a ten-year industry leader in the Web-use management field and encourages companies to clearly communicate Web-use policies to their employees and then closely monitor for compliance.
A study completed under the direction of Dr. Elias Aboujaoude at Stanford University’s School of Medicine found that one in eight adults is addicted to the Internet, and more than 8% surveyed admitted hiding their Internet use. Dr. Aboujaoude stated that "the issue is starting to be recognized as a legitimate object of clinical attention, as well as an economic problem, given that a great deal of non-essential Internet use takes place at work."
Those that are addicted to the Internet spend more than 30 hours a week of non-essential use on the Internet and are mostly white, college-educated males in their 30s. Most likely, they are not spending all or even most of those 30 hours surfing the Internet at home. Instead, they are doing their personal surfing at work.
With a higher percentage of people admitting they are addicted to the Internet, it is important that businesses protect themselves from productivity losses. Wavecrest’s Cyfin and CyBlock software help organizations improve workforce productivity by monitoring and/or filtering employees’ Web use. Wavecrest's products block and/or capture Web activity in up to 81 different content categories (like gambling, social networking, and shopping), allowing managers and IT personnel to spot Web abuse quickly.
Sources:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6062980.stm
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2033323,00.asp
On Friday, October 13, 2006, President Bush signed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act making it illegal for banks and credit unions to process bets made online. Online gambling has grown to be a multi-billion dollar industry over the past several years, and the laws are finally catching up to the technology.
The U.S. Department of Justice has held the view that online gambling is illegal under the Federal Wire Act of 1961 and has attempted to go after several gaming executives. The DOJ indicted BetonSports founder, Gary Kaplan and its CEO, David Carruthers, on charges of racketeering, conspiracy, and fraud for taking sports bets from U.S. residents. They arrested David Carruthers at a U.S. airport earlier this year.
Internet gambling is enjoyed by 23 million Americans, and it is not uncommon for them to visit online gambling sites at work. According to a June 2006 analysis of employee Web use at work by comScore Media Matrix, more than half of the page views by workers were to Online Gambling sites.
Online gambling is just one of a number of reasons why businesses and other organizations should use accurate Internet monitoring or filtering software to protect themselves from legal liability threats. According to Dennis McCabe, vice president of business development for Wavecrest Computing, "it is extremely important for companies to use an accurate, reliable product when monitoring Web use." Wavecrest’s Cyfin and CyBlock products are just that. Wavecrest’s Cyfin Reporter has been trusted by the U.S. Department of Justice for the last four years, and they recently renewed their license for a fifth year.
Underscoring the scope of the social networking phenomenon, Google named MySpace the top gainer for places to visit on the Internet in ’05, only two years after it was founded. It recently topped Yahoo Mail as the most-visited Web site in the U.S. What started as a site for aspiring musicians and bands to share their music and concert locations quickly became the number one spot to connect with others for everything from making new friends, to dating, to professional networking.
Many think social networking sites are just a place for teens to hang out. Not true. According to comScore Media Metrix's analysis in August, half of MySpace users are 35 or older. A larger, growing number of adults frequent MySpace because it is an easy, quick way to keep in touch with current friends and family, find old friends and classmates, and listen to new music on a daily basis.
With 80 million registered users worldwide and the world’s 73rd most-visited Web site, many of these visits obviously occur during business hours. Today, an estimated 130,000 new members join the site every day, totaling 3 million new members per month. The recent Nine Inch Nails release alone resulted in a half-million user streams in one week. And judging by the above statistics, a very large portion of these streams had to have occurred at work – a lot, all day long.
A continual increase in traffic to social networking sites mandated a separate category in Wavecrest’s URL control list. "These heavily trafficked sites have fast become a major productivity drainer for our customers," said Dennis McCabe of Wavecrest Computing. "Pretty much anyone, any age range, who frequents social networking sites does so from work—unless access is restricted. And the first step to restricting access is identification through proper categorization."
Recent studies have shown that employees surfing the Internet at work put company networks at a higher security risk. According to CNET News, a recent IDC Denmark study found that surfing the Internet poses a bigger risk to companies than email attachments. IDC found that “up to 30% of companies with more than 500 staff have been infected as a result of Internet surfing.”
Symantec recently released their security report on September 25 and found that nearly half of all computer attacks are targeting Web browsers. Because it has been more difficult to get users to open email attachments, hackers are attaching spyware and malicious code to Web sites, so when a user visits an infected site, spyware or malicious code is automatically downloaded.
Sites that are at the most risk are those that enable information to pass between users quickly, e.g., social networking sites and blogs. According to recent studies by comScore, the average U.S. visitor spent 8.7 usage days on MySpace in July 2006. These sites continue to see an increase in visitors. Just in the past year, MySpace has seen a 467% increase in the number of visitors from the UK.
Per Anderson, IDC Denmark’s Managing Director, stated that “the risk of infection is about five times greater for companies that allow Internet usage by staff to go unhindered and unmonitored.” To reduce the risk of infection, companies need to protect themselves with accurate Web-use management software.
Filtering and/or monitoring employees’ Internet access with one of Wavecrest’s Cyfin or CyBlock software products greatly reduces the risk of security threats and legal liability while helping to increase workforce productivity. In addition to offering Web-use management software, Wavecrest encourages companies to create a Web usage policy and clearly communicate it to their employees.