Aussies top personal Internet use survey, but keep it brief

Aug 4, 2005: While we may be no angels when it comes to using the Internet at work for personal use, at least Australian employees spend a fair bit less time using our work PCs or laptops for non-work related activities that a lot of our international counterparts.

The 2005 Australia Web@Work survey, conducted by Dynamic Markets Limited for Internet security software provider Websense, forms part of a wider study which spans Asia Pacific and Latin America, in which the following eight regions were polled regarding Internet use in the workplace: Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Columbia, Hong Kong, India, and Mexico.

It found that more Australian employees (96 percent) spend at least some of their working week accessing non-work related Internet sites from a corporate-owned PC or laptop than those from any other country surveyed. However, at an average of 3.6 hours per week spent on these activities, Australians are spending less time surfing at work than many of their neighbours such as India, which averaged more than 5.3 hours per week. They also spend less personal time than their IT managers give them credit for, given that Australian IT managers surveyed estimated an average of eight hours personal surfing time per employee.

It also found that companies may not have the level of protection necessary to ward off emerging Internet threats. For example, 96 percent of Australian IT managers are at least somewhat confident that their company's current antivirus software is able to stop viruses from attacking their company's network, yet 46 percent say their company's computer systems have been hit by web-based viruses.

Australia scored in the middle of the field on most security issues but showed a high awareness of phishing at 44 percent (the second highest behind Brazil). However, despite this awareness, 28 percent of Australian employees surveyed said that they had given out financial, personal or confidential data, such as corporate network passwords, as a result of a phishing attack.  In comparison, 62 percent of IT managers in Australia believed that that their employees have clicked through the URL on a phishing attack.

Also of concern is the fact that 58 percent of the Australian employees surveyed acknowledged using their office PC or laptop to send or receive attachments through instant messaging. While 18 percent were aware that they had visited sites that contained spyware, 72 percent of the Australian IT managers said their workstations have been infected by spyware at some point.

The most frequent personal usage of a corporate laptop remained the same across each of the countries surveyed: banking and shopping, downloading media such as music or movies, and storing personal photographs. Seven percent of those surveyed admitted accessing peer-to-peer file sharing sites with a work-owned laptop, while another 7 percent acknowledged sharing the laptop with family and friends.

At 30 percent, more employees in Australia admitted to uploading or downloading non work-related MP3s or video/movie clips onto their PCs or work laptops than any other region. 

Interestingly, 28 percent of Australian IT managers believed that employees were using laptops to download unlicensed software, while only 4 percent of Australian of employees admitted to this. 

Despite a number of widely publicised discoveries in Australia and elsewhere which have led to dismissals, pornographic sites continue to draw visitors, with 8 percent of all employees surveyed in Australia admitting that they had visited such a website at work, either by accident or on purpose.

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