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Cerberian
and SonicWALL Web Usage Survey Reveals 75% Accidentally See Porn at Work
Personal Internet surfing and
pornography plague the office; Survey validates need for Internet access
management technology
June 23, 2004, Sunnyvale California,
and Salt Lake City - More than 75 percent
of people have accidentally visited a pornographic Web site while at work;
15 percent have visited such sites more than 10 times, according to a
new Web usage survey conducted by Cerberian, Inc. a leading provider of
intelligent Web filtering solutions for businesses, homes and schools,
and SonicWALL Inc., (Nasdaq: SNWL - News), a leading provider of integrated
security, productivity and mobility solutions. The survey also reported
that 50 percent of respondents spent more than 10 percent of their time
at work surfing the Web for personal reasons, which is roughly equal to
four hours per week, or nearly nine days a year.
More
than 2,400 people responded during the month of April 2004 via email to
questions about everything from Internet access policies, to personal
surfing habits at work and feelings about co-workers surf habits. According
to the survey, the Internet is still a relatively unmonitored medium with
60 percent of the respondents indicating their organizations did not have
rules against personal Web surfing at work, and more than 50 percent of
organizations have not implemented any type of Internet filtering technology.
Unmonitored Internet access raises potential liability issues for organizations
especially when it comes to employees being exposed to pornography at
the office and employees using corporate resources to download, store
and exchange copyrighted material. Inappropriate use of the Internet at
work may give rise to serious disciplinary problems in the workplace.
Results from the Cerberian/SonicWALL Web Usage Survey validate the need
for organizations to implement Internet access policies and content filtering
technologies.
"SonicWALL and Cerberian compiled the results of this survey to give organizations
a better understanding of how to balance the wants of employees and the
needs of the business," said Matt Mosman, chief executive officer of Cerberian.
"The results of the survey are clear in that 63% of employees are concerned
about the ease of access to objectionable content at work. Our technologies
protect organizations and employees from the inherent risks of the Internet.
We recommend that organizations take the initiative and implement the
appropriate Internet access policies to help strengthen employee productivity
and network security."
According to the survey the most common ways people have accidentally
reached pornographic content on the Web are:
• Pop up windows (55%),
• Misrepresented links (52%),
• Misspelled URLs (48%), and
• Auto links within emails (23%).
While the survey indicates it is common to accidentally come across pornographic
web sites, the survey also reported the following:
• 16 percent of people have knowingly surfed pornography sites at
work at least once;
• 40 percent have seen co-workers surfing porn sites;
• 32 percent of people have seen co-workers surf gambling sites;
• 91 percent have seen people shopping online; and
• 85 percent have seen co-workers surfing sports-related web sites.
The survey also asked how people felt after seeing co-workers surf pornography,
gambling, shopping and sports web sites. Sixty-eight percent were bothered
by pornography surfing, with 47 percent bothered enough to confront the
offender or mention it to management/human resources. Fifty-nine percent
were offended by gambling surfing, 35 percent by shopping online and 29
percent by sports surfing.
“It is clear from the survey that there is a growing awareness among
individuals as well as organizations of the problems resulting from unregulated
employee Internet access,” said Matthew Medeiros, chief executive
officer at SonicWALL. “While pornography is obviously the biggest
concern, other surfing habits, from shopping to sports, are absorbing
an increasing amount of employee attention inside organizations. Lost
productivity as well as security issues and the abuse of network resources
will continue to mount unless businesses formulate and enforce Internet
access policies and internal controls.”
Cerberian’s advanced Web filtering solution is more accurate and
more effective than traditional filtering solutions. As a result of its
Dynamic Real-Time Rating (DRTR) Technology, Cerberian’s intelligent
filtering solution rises above the competition and in turn provides the
best Web management tool and filtering technology available.
In 2003, SonicWALL selected Cerberian’s master ratings database
as the rating database for SonicWALL’s Content Filtering Service
(CFS) 2.0., which is integrated with SonicWALL’s family of security
gateway appliances to provide policy enforcement and protection from unwanted
and inappropriate Internet content for businesses and schools. SonicWALL
CFS 2.0 enforces content filtering policies by combining Cerberian’s
rating database with SonicWALL’s unique and innovative filtering
and caching architecture to enforce the desired levels of access for groups
and individuals.
“We have the most effective and efficient solution available to
protect against the threats we see from this survey. Folks who are concerned
about employee Internet access need to deploy Cerberian’s solution,”
said Matt Mosman. “Other vendors who merely rely on URL filters
are not capable of providing the same level of protection. We don’t
rely on human raters to find the latest threats on the Net; rather we
use intelligent technology to do the hard work for us, which has proven
to be more accurate and more efficient.”
Report Availability:
A complete compilation of survey findings can be found at www.cerberian.com/surveyresults.
About SonicWALL, Inc.
SonicWALL, Inc. is a leading provider of integrated network security,
mobility, and productivity solutions for the SMB, enterprise, e-commerce,
education, healthcare, retail/point-of-sale, and government markets. Core
technologies include firewall, VPN, wireless, intrusion detection and
prevention, SSL, anti-virus, and content filtering, along with award-winning
security management solutions. Together, these products and technologies
provide the most comprehensive distributed enforcement architecture available.
SonicWALL, Inc. is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA. SonicWALL trades on
the NASDAQ exchange under the symbol SNWL. For more information, contact
SonicWALL at +1 (408) 745-9600 or visit the company web site at http://www.sonicwall.com/.
Safe Harbor Regarding Forward-Looking Statements made by SonicWALL
Certain statements in this press release are "forward-looking statements"
within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of
1995. The forward-looking statements include but are not limited to statements
regarding the ability of our technologies to protect organizations and
employees from objectionable content on the Internet and the ability of
our Content Filtering Service to provide policy enforcement and protection
from unwanted and inappropriate Internet content. These forward-looking
statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the
time the statements are made and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties
that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated
in the forward-looking statements. In addition, please see the "Risk
Factors" described in SonicWALL’s Securities and Exchange Commission
filings, including our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December
31, 2003 and Form 10-Q for subsequent periods, for a more detailed description
of the risks facing our business. All forward-looking statements included
in this release are based upon information available to SonicWALL as of
the date of the release, and we assume no obligation to update any such
forward-looking statement.
NOTE: SonicWALL is a registered trademark of SonicWALL, Inc. Other product
and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered
trademarks of their respective companies.
About Cerberian
Cerberian has revolutionized Internet management by delivering the most
intelligent, hassle-free Web filtering solution available. This unique
technology allows organizations to effectively manage and filter objectionable
and unproductive Web content while reducing risk of security breaches,
limiting legal liability, conserving IT resources, and boosting employee
productivity. Offered as a managed service, Cerberian minimizes initial
investment and ongoing management burden by maintaining the technology
and data management responsibility at Cerberian's global data centers.
Cerberian realizes that a URL database alone is not enough to stop new
and uncategorized Web content. Consequently, unlike other filtering solutions,
Cerberian's Dynamic Real-Time Rating (DRTR) technology analyzes
all requested Web pages in real-time to ensure the highest level of protection
while constantly feeding new ratings to Cerberian's massive ratings
database. Cerberian Web Manager is available as an integrated, value-added
service on leading network appliances, service solutions, and security
software applications, allowing organizations to choose how they prefer
to deploy and manage Internet security.
For more information about Cerberian, please visit www.cerberian.com
or e-mail info@cerberian.com.
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Cerberian® and the Cerberian logo are registered trademarks of Cerberian Inc. Cerberian Web Manager™, Dynamic Real-Time Rating™, and Dynamic Background Rating™ are trademarks of Cerberian Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
For further information, please contact:
Greg Heaps
Vice President of Marketing
Cerberian
Email: gheaps@cerberian.com
© 2003, Cerberian, Inc.™
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