More than a quarter of UK workplace PCs contains pornographic and inappropriate images, a new audit has found.
PixAlert, a software supplier that aims to protect PCs from inappropriate and illegal images, conducted audits on 125 corporate and public sector networks – a total of 10,000 PCs – over a nine month period. It found that 46.8% of the images showed full nudity or sexual activity.
Moreover, 12% of 12,000 e-mail accounts and 5% of 26,000 file server shares scanned were also affected.
While 35% were internet images, 45% of images detected were sourced from e-mails, and of these 19% were outbound and 35% sent internally.
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Andy Churley, marketing director at PixAlert, said: “A significant number of employees continue to ignore corporate policies and in some cases are going to extraordinary lengths to bypass protection systems in order to obtain and distribute inappropriate material.
“Corporate officers wrongly assume that boundary protection systems stop all digital pornography from entering the organisation but, in PixAlert’s experience, almost all corporations will have a significant amount of pornography on their networks,” Churley concluded.
