Proofpoint found that businesses have definitely become wary about blogs.  An official statement claimed that, during the past year, "17 percent disciplined an employee for violating blog or message board policies, while nearly nine percent reported terminating an employee for such a violation (both increases from 2008, 11 percent and six percent, respectively)."

It seems that firms are aware of YouTube and Facebook, as well.  The report indicated that eight percent of corporations (each) got rid of people for violating policies pertaining to multimedia sites and social networks.

Finally, if employees figured they were safe using the relative newcomer, Twitter, they should think again.  Proofpoint reported that 13 percent of U.S. companies investigated "exposure incidents" involving Twitter and Twitter-like services.

You might interpret this as evidence that people should learn to keep their mouths shut (and/or fingers still).  A more charitable view is that perhaps social media sites should make their privacy notices and options more visible.  Regardless, it looks like social media is starting to have a significant impact in the workplace.

The survey found that 48 percent of the 69 Australian companies surveyed disciplined an employee for violating email policies and 18 percent fired an employee in the past year for violating such policies.

"Australian organizations’ concerns about the risks associated with outbound email and data loss are rapidly catching up with the US," said Gerry Tucker, regional head for Proofpoint.

Email messaging is the greatest risk for the majority of Australian companies. Sixty-two percent said email posed the greatest risk of loss, followed by Web mail at 18 percent, other messaging systems at 15 percent, and blogs and messages boards at 5 percent.

"Around one in five Australian organizations terminated employees for email violations in the past year, closely following the US, where it was around one in four," Tucker said.

Proofpoint says information leakage, can lead to regulatory compliance violations, legal problems, loss of customer confidence and loss of competitiveness.

Organizations are still not clear about what’s happening with emails," Tucker said. "Organizations are really struggling to come to terms with the potential cost of a security breach and are becoming more concerned about outbound threats via webmail and the loss of data."
 

Image based spam increased for the second consecutive month. In November image-based spam rose to 9 percent of total spam volume, up 23 percent over October. Microsoft Word document spam (.doc attachments) increased by 64 percent over October levels to 4 percent of the total spam volume.

PDF spam remained a very small percentage of total spam volume. But rose to its highest levels since September. The use of PDF spam increased by 101 percent over October levels and represented 1 percent of total spam volume.

MP3 spam, where the spammer’s message is attached as an MP3 format audio file continued to decline. During November, MP3 spam accounted for just 0.04 percent of total spam volume, falling by 33 percent.

"Because the mix of different spam types is constantly changing, enterprises need spam protection that automatically adapts to the latest threats," said Rami Habal, director of product marketing for Proofpoint.

"Proofpoint’s anti-spam solution, powered by Proofpoint MLX machine learning technology, has maintained extremely high effectiveness over the course of 2007, delivering an average of 99.87% effectiveness during the month of November."

Firms Fire Over Blogs, Social Networks

“More than one-quarter of surveyed companies (27.3%) have terminated an employee for violating email policies in the past 12 months,” according to Proofpoint, and in the same period, 9.1 percent of those companies dismissed folks over “the exposure of sensitive information via blog or message board postings.”

Want one more disconcerting statistic?  “In the past 12 months, 14.0% of surveyed companies have disciplined an employee for violating social networking policies and nearly 5% terminated an employee for such a violation,” claims the Proofpoint report.

Only, to be more accurate, it was Forrester, not Proofpoint, that conducted the research.  Wired’s Ryan Singel notes this, and also writes, “I have doubts that this many companies have actually fired employees for message board or blog postings, but that’s just a gut, Chertoff-style, danger-dog hunch.”

Singel later continues, “Proofpoint, a vendor that sells message monitoring equipment, also has a vested interest in having companies perceive that they need to be monitoring their employees.  That doesn’t make the survey flawed, but it’s certainly in the interests of security vendors to keep the perceived threat level high.”

Still, for those of you who aren’t self-employed or near the top of your organization, it might be best to watch what you write.  And as recent events at Whole Foods have demonstrated, even head honchos need to behave themselves.