Home workers view twice as much porn

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Remote workers using laptops at home visit porn sites two and a half times more often than office-bound employees, according to security firm ScanSafe.

The analysis of eight billion web requests also found that home workers were more than five times more likely to visit "extreme websites" containing "graphic content", and four times more likely to visit sites containing illegal activity, such as bomb making.

ScanSafe said employers shouldn't only be worried about the downtime associated with their employees' extra-curricular activity, but also the legal and security implications.

"If employees are using a company laptop to download illegal music files from home, their bosses may be liable," claimed Spencer Parker from Scansafe.

"Staff assume their web habits away from the office are unsupervised, however, the problem is that no matter where they are working, they could be putting their company at risk."

Porn and illegal download sites are also notorious for spreading malware, raising the risk of infecting company PCs.

Yet, whilst the home workers might be wasting time on XXX sites, they're less likely to be sorting out their personal finances on company time. ScanSafe's research found that remote workers were two-thirds less likely to visit an online banking site.

"A lot of people assume that security is much better in the office than at home or at Wi-Fi hotspots," said Parker. "Also, people feel that being able to bank or shop online at work is much more acceptable nowadays as part of the overall work-life balance."

The Scansafe data could help explain the findings of a previous report, which suggested home workers have higher morale and less stress than their office-bound counterparts.

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