Illegal Online Activities at Work Posing Risk to State Computers

Vermont state employees committed a huge number of malicious activities while watching NCAA basketball on the Internet. This has been revealed in an internal document distributed by Agency of Human Services Commissioner Rob Hofmann, which alerted workers to the activation of a monitoring system being installed on state PCs.

According to Hofmann, half a dozen examples of misuse of state computers have been identified, which include connecting to porn sites, downloading thousands of porn images onto a state PC, and meanwhile downloading a computer virus onto the system that began infiltrating into a computer system of a local bank, as well as using state systems for running small organizations on taxpayer time.

Commenting on these incidents, some of which occurred recently while others took place around six years back, Hofmann said that they are committed to eradicate such type of behavior displayed by the state employees, as per the news published by canadianbusiness.com on May 20, 2010.

Officials noted that in past also, state employees have been found misusing state computers to visit porn sites during office hours. However, it has been difficult to get details. This is because the misuse is done by a relatively few number of workers, as highlighted by Hofmann, and administrators do not even care, or are short of time, to monitor such incidental misuse of Internet by their employees.

Hofmann said that it's very unfortunate that the activities of few employees blemish the fine efforts of most of the workers.

To deal with such incidents in future, Vermont is installing software worth $120,000, which will restrict employees' access to certain websites. The software will also monitor the online activities of state workers.

However, the expense of $120,000 on the software installation has been questioned by some lawmakers. A Republican representing Orleans and Essex counties, Sen. Vincent Illuzzi, said that in such a time, when more than 800 jobs have been cut from the state government and salaries have been reduced, such an expensive step conveys a wrong message to the people that the state is not having trust on its workforce, reported by moneycentral.msn.com on May 20, 2010.

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» SPAMfighter News - 6/1/2010