Businesses watch employees' email

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Large companies are attempting to battle data leaks and other risks by reading their employees' email, according to a new survey by Proofpoint.

The email security and DLP vendor found that outbound emails were the greatest source of risk for European companies with up to 30 per cent of respondents confirming they had investigated an email leak of confidential information in the past 12 months.

However, Proofpoint also found that companies were willing to take action against risk-takers. The survey found that 38 per cent of businesses in the UK employ staff to read employee emails, with over a fifth (22 per cent) terminating employees' contracts for email policy violations.

Only a small proportion of companies (16 per cent) employed technology to carry out similar monitoring functions.

Proofpoint's MD EMEA David Stanley said he was surprised by some of the figures and said that it raised some important issues, such as the lack in confidence in technology.

"The amount of staff that are reading outbound emails stands at 38 per cent in the UK, that's one in four companies. Meanwhile only 16 per cent of UK businesses employ technology to do this. What this proves is that companies have no confidence or knowledge of technology. It certainly shows that there is a lack of education in this area," said Stanley.

"Twenty-two per cent of companies have terminated staff - that's a very scary scenario," he added.

As well as email information leakage, Proofpoint found that risks could also be incurred by employees using blogs, message boards and media sharing sites, such as YouTube, along with mobile devices.

The survey found that 18 per cent of companies had investigated exposure of confidential, sensitive or private information from lost or stolen mobile devices, while 12 per cent disciplined employees for improper use of blogs and message boards. A further five per cent disciplined employees for social network violations and eight per cent for improper use of media sharing sites.

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