Clearswift Survey Highlights Lack of Employee Education on Spam

Poll finds employees contributing to problem through poor education

London, UK – April 21st, 2004: End-user education on how to safely use email among business employees is still lacking, with results of the 2004 Spam Monitor survey undertaken by Clearswift, the MIMEsweeper company, revealing that more than 34 per cent of organisations are still without an anti-spam policy in place.

The Clearswift poll, conducted online in association with TRUSTe, the nonprofit privacy certification and seal program, received responses from more than 1,200 businesspeople from around the world. While more than a third of businesses did not have an anti-spam policy, an additional 19 per cent of respondents said they did not know if their organisation maintained a policy.

Forty-three percent of respondents said their businesses communicated their anti-spam policy to employees, but the remainder (57 per cent) confirmed that the policy was not being communicated or they didn’t know if it was being communicated – a worrying statistic.

Employees’ ignorance of safe email use was further illustrated by the revelation that 22 per cent of respondents knew that employees had responded to a spam offer. Only seven percent of firms took action against employees found to be responding to spam.

Employee collaboration with the IT department was also low. In more than 65 per cent of respondents’ companies, fewer than 25 per cent of their email users bothered to report spam to the IT department.

"The recent MyDoom email virus confirmed for the security industry the lack of awareness about opening spam email attachments, with too many people being tricked into opening the virus," Clearswift director of research, Alyn Hockey, said.

“While those companies who are actively educating employees on safe email use are to be applauded, the Clearswift Spam Monitor research shows there are still too many businesses not taking the threat seriously. A safe email usage policy and regular employee education is vital if organisations are serious about curbing the spam threat.”

The 2004 Clearswift Spam Monitor survey is based on the input of 1,260 professionals at middle to senior IT management level who participated in an online study commissioned by Clearswift in October 2003. The survey is representative of a cross-section of industry sectors and geographies. The largest groups of respondents were based in the USA, UK, Australia, France and Germany. Responses were received from 45 countries in all. Respondents worked in small, medium and large organisations – 38.7 per cent worked in organisations of fewer than 50 people, 18 per cent in organisations of between 50 and 500 people, 5.5 percent in organisations of between 500 and 1,000 people and 30.3 per cent worked in organisations with more than 1,000 people.

About Clearswift

Clearswift simplifies content security.

Our products help organizations enforce best-practice email and web use, ensuring all traffic complies with internal policy and external regulations.

Our range of content filtering solutions makes it easy to deploy, manage and maintain no-compromise email and web security for both inbound and outbound traffic.

Clearswift is the only vendor to offer comprehensive, policy-based content security in all three deployment methods: as software, as an appliance and as a managed service.

All three platforms are designed to take the hassle out of securing internet traffic, with a clear, intuitive management interface; automatic, 'zero-touch' updates; powerful reporting and common-sense policy management.

Twenty years of experience across 17,000 organizations has helped us raise security standards while simplifying security management at the same time.

We've helped many of the world's most successful organizations use the internet with confidence and are committed to staying ahead of the market and helping our customers defend against all emerging threats.

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