Rising Spam Level Shaking the Confidence of Australians

The third "Securing assets For Enterprise (SaFE) Survey" conducted by Proofpoint on the IT Managers and executives in Australia discovered that about 46% of the respondents were not very certain about the legitimacy of e-mails received by them.

The survey highlighted that over 72% respondents stated that spam has become an increasing problem for nearly 72.5% Australian companies. And several companies were reported to have suffered immensely due to various e-mail issues. This comprises of 20% companies stating that they have lost business, 20% reporting that they have suffered privacy or security breaches, and over half of them stating that the productivity of their staff was badly affected.

Gerry Tucker, Proofpoint's Regional Head in Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), said that the survey is indicating towards the steadily declining confidence of the Australian users on e-mails and its adverse impacts faced by the majority of companies, as reported by SCMAGAZINE on December 10, 2008.

Tucker recommended the IT staff to make their workers, including executives, familiar with the "five golden rules", since awareness is the primary tool to prevent the online threats due to e-mails.

The five golden rules include expressing suspicions over the e-mails that urge for personal IDs, usernames or passwords and financial information, avoid clicking any unfamiliar links given in the e-mail and also not to open any e-mail attachments.

Online shoppers should be very careful while entering any financial information; in fact, IT employees and other users are recommended not to fill any form attached with e-mails. The users are asked to keep a regular watch over their bank statements and online accounts to detect any sort of breach.

Proofpoint also advised Australian and international firms to provide training to its workers on safe and secure computing tactics so that they can address online spamming and breaching problems in a better way.

Moreover, companies should use all the security solutions and should periodically get their spam filters updated. They should observe for any sort of suspicious or high-volume traffic over the Internet and respond instantly to the Internet threats.

Related article: Rising Number of Online Shoppers could Lure Fraudsters this Holiday

» SPAMfighter News - 12/22/2008