Office workers are playing with fire when they use and misuse company email, according to a survey by Content Technologies Ltd, a Reading, UK-based firm email security company. The survey reports that nearly two thirds of office workers have jeopardized the credibility of their businesses and their own positions by making errors in using email. This may take the form of inappropriate or offensive messaging, disclosing company confidentiality, or simply sending the message to the wrong destination.
Contracts, jobs, and law suits have all been lost as a result of email irregularity. Employees as high-profile as Bill Gates have found their email dialogue come back to haunt them. The electronic messages of the Microsoft supremo dating back to 1995 were used against him in the recent antitrust case.
Chris Heslop, marketing manager for Content Technologies, uses the analogy of passport control. A firewall is like the passport, revealing who is going in and out of the network, he says. The Content Technologies product is the customs official, analyzing what is passing. Heslop says the MIMEsweeper product is a set of security mechanisms that can be used to check emails coming into the company for viruses, over-sized files, games, videos, spamming or spoofing. He says it can monitor traffic within a company’s system for keywords, cracking down on racist, sexist, or other offensive messaging. And it can stop confidential company information leaving the network.
Content was established in April 1998, spinning off from Integralis Group where it had functioned previously under the name Integralis Technology. The company had revenue last year of $10.2m, up from $4.7m in 1997.
