A short survey commissioned by Symantec during football’s 2010 World Cup has revealed an encouragingly low level of online threats and scams related to the tournament. Eighty three percent of respondents encountered none at all while 71% enjoyed a spam-free World Cup.
According to Symantec’s John Harrison, there were, however, a few who fell prey to World Cup-related online malicious activity. Eight percent of respondents said they experienced malware infection, 7% said they were the victim of identity theft and 6% had their social networking accounts hacked.
“Perhaps the most startling finding was that nearly a quarter (23%) of the respondents said their workplaces had no policies governing the use of work computers for personal activities, such as watching online video, online shopping and online gambling.
“This poses not only a threat to productivity, but a real threat to organisations’ digital infrastructures and sensitive data.”
Harrison adds that this lack of policies is surprising with many modern attacks targeting the end user, and with the social engineering being leveraged in these attacks getting more convincing by the day.
“A simple targeted e-mail or social networking message with a link to a ‘funny’ video could result in a severe malware infection. Even when policies are in place, our survey found that 44% of respondents said they circumvented these policies and used a work computer for non-work-related activities,” he says.
The most common personal activity performed on a work computer is surfing the Internet for news, sports updates or other non work-related information (79% of respondents). However, riskier activities such as watching online video and shopping online were also common practice, with 53 and 42% (respectively) of survey takers reporting they had participated in these activities from a work computer.
To view the full results of the survey, which captured all of North America, click here