The study, conducted by PixAlert, involved monitoring 10,000 computers in 125 businesses. Thirty-five percent of the pornographic images were downloaded from online, while 45 percent were from email.
“With over a third of all images found created in the last 12 months, it is clear that a significant number of employees continue to ignore corporate policies and in some cases are going to extraordinary lengths to bypass protection systems in order to obtain and distribute inappropriate material,” said Andy Churley, a director at PixAlert. “Corporate officers wrongly assume that boundary protection systems stop all digital pornography from entering the organization but, in PixAlert’s experience, almost all corporations will have a significant amount of pornography on their networks.”
Additionally, 12.4 percent of the 12,000 email accounts PixAlert monitored were “infected” as was 5.4 percent of 26,000 file server shares.
Churley said that companies were particularly concerned when workers used corporate email to send pornographic images internally, or by using their corporate email to send it outside the company.
“While all organizations actively discourage access to inappropriate images at work, our audits show that the reality is that all establishments have a lot of digital pornography residing on their networks that they don't know about,” Churley said. “Companies are particularly concerned when they have visibility of the number of pornographic images being distributed by email internally or sent out to other organizations using a corporate email address.”