Sunday, April 27, 2008 2:00 PM PDT
Enterprise users are "actively and intentionally" evading IT security controls and ignoring acceptable use policies, according to Palo Alto Networks' first annual "Application Usage and Risk Report."
The recent survey results from Palo Alto, a firewall vendor, are based on traffic from 350,000 users in 20 organizations that span the financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, state/local government and healthcare industries.
The report highlights applications (not generally supported by enterprise IT) that employees are actively using, as well as the major risks associated with their use.
Among the findings:
- External proxies that IT does not support, such as CGIProxy and KProxy, were present in 80 percent of the customer networks
- Web-based file transfer and storage applications such as YouSendIt and MediaMax were detected in 30 percent of sites
- Over 50 percent of applications using port 80 (the default port number for a web server) were not business related
- Google applications were found in 60 percent of the sites using port 80
- Web video and streaming audio consumed significant bandwidth on 100 percent and 95 percent of the sites sampled, respectively
- Peer-to-peer file sharing applications were found on 90 percent of the sites
Associated risks include:
- Data loss through unmonitored and/or unauthorized file transfers
- Compliance violations, both with internal policies and external regulations
- Business exposure from malware propagation or application vulnerability exploits
- Operational cost increases due to higher bandwidth consumption and added IT expense
- Lost productivity from excessive use of personal applications
Advertisement: Learn about storing and securing your data before disaster strikes.
Copyright © 2007 CSO.
- Sponsored Resource:Are you ready for virtualization? Try the sever assessment tool.
- Sponsored Resource:Stay at home servers. Learn more about a home server for your family.
- Sponsored Resource:Get the communications, data, and security a business needs in one neat package. Learn more.
- Sponsored Resource:Learn more about ultra light notebooks from Asus and the best warranty in the industry.
- Sponsored Resource:Thinking about a new Laptop? Lenovo has models to meet everyone's needs.
- Sponsored Resource:Get the truth about remanufactured ink. Learn more from HP.
- Sponsored Resource:Six smart ways to grow small business IT
News For Your Business
- Fugitive Spam King Dead in Apparent Murder-suicide
- Buying an E-mail List? Marketing Company Says Never Again
- Study Paints Open-Source Software as a Security Risk
- Laptop Security: Keep the Bad Guys at Bay
- Attack Code Released for New DNS Attack
Community Comments