AlbertPacino
Skilled
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<font color="#FF9900">Games, porn and MP3 downloads. One employee's machine showed 27,000 rounds of solitaire played</font>
Computer troubleshooter Chris Aconley once found an employee's computer had clocked 27,000 games of solitaire since it had been set up.
In another technical tragedy, he discovered a virus had been transmitted from a tanker company's head office to its entire fleet of ships - with a per-character charge for the millions of lines of virus code that added up to a whopping $500,000 Telex bill.
At another company, Aconley found computers being used for up to seven hours of a working day playing games - and, no, they weren't game testers.
Such instances cost millions of dollars in repairs and lost productivity, money that Aconley says many small businesses aren't even aware they are risking as their employees download MP3s, play games or surf the Web.
"The worst case I saw was the woman who played solitaire for up to six hours a day when she was supposed to be working," said Aconley, national director of Computer Troubleshooters. "She had been doing it for a year, and when we saw the 27,000 games of solitaire, she admitted she had been using her computer strictly to play the game and not to do any work at all.
"She was addicted, she couldn't pull herself away."
Aconley said that in smaller companies, which don't have the luxury of an information technology department, employers often have no idea how their employees use their computers.
One company was mystified to find pornography on its computers. It traced the problem to a part-time bookkeeper whose youngster had discovered the company's remote access password and was surfing the Web for porn via the company's network rather than risk being discovered on a home machine.
"I've seen people playing games for six or seven hours a day, and the employers just don't know it is happening," Aconley said.
"The bosses think: 'This gets done, that got done. OK, so they're a little slow at things.' But they don't really know what their employees are doing on their computers."
The latest threat Aconley sees is online poker.
"Now you have your employees playing poker on company time, using your company's hardware and becoming addicted and not doing any work," he said.
Downloading MP3 files through a file-sharing service like LimeWire can also open networks to outside infiltration, a problem that can beset smaller businesses that might rely on out-of-the-box firewall solutions without understanding how they should be set up, Aconley said.
"There is not only the loss of productivity and the cost of fixing the problem. There is also the risk that if your employee is doing something like downloading child pornography, the business that owns the computer will be liable."
Aconley said the first defence for companies is prevention, with clearly spelled-out policies on computer use. He said that must be followed up with monitoring, with employees being made aware their actions can be tracked.
"The ideal situation is where everybody is told up front what is happening," he said. "Employers can say: "We putting software in place to monitor Internet usage,' and if employees know it will be monitored, they won't do things they shouldn't be doing.
"It has to be pre-emptive."
Source
<font color="#FF9900">Games, porn and MP3 downloads. One employee's machine showed 27,000 rounds of solitaire played</font>
Computer troubleshooter Chris Aconley once found an employee's computer had clocked 27,000 games of solitaire since it had been set up.
In another technical tragedy, he discovered a virus had been transmitted from a tanker company's head office to its entire fleet of ships - with a per-character charge for the millions of lines of virus code that added up to a whopping $500,000 Telex bill.
At another company, Aconley found computers being used for up to seven hours of a working day playing games - and, no, they weren't game testers.
Such instances cost millions of dollars in repairs and lost productivity, money that Aconley says many small businesses aren't even aware they are risking as their employees download MP3s, play games or surf the Web.
"The worst case I saw was the woman who played solitaire for up to six hours a day when she was supposed to be working," said Aconley, national director of Computer Troubleshooters. "She had been doing it for a year, and when we saw the 27,000 games of solitaire, she admitted she had been using her computer strictly to play the game and not to do any work at all.
"She was addicted, she couldn't pull herself away."
Aconley said that in smaller companies, which don't have the luxury of an information technology department, employers often have no idea how their employees use their computers.
One company was mystified to find pornography on its computers. It traced the problem to a part-time bookkeeper whose youngster had discovered the company's remote access password and was surfing the Web for porn via the company's network rather than risk being discovered on a home machine.
"I've seen people playing games for six or seven hours a day, and the employers just don't know it is happening," Aconley said.
"The bosses think: 'This gets done, that got done. OK, so they're a little slow at things.' But they don't really know what their employees are doing on their computers."
The latest threat Aconley sees is online poker.
"Now you have your employees playing poker on company time, using your company's hardware and becoming addicted and not doing any work," he said.
Downloading MP3 files through a file-sharing service like LimeWire can also open networks to outside infiltration, a problem that can beset smaller businesses that might rely on out-of-the-box firewall solutions without understanding how they should be set up, Aconley said.
"There is not only the loss of productivity and the cost of fixing the problem. There is also the risk that if your employee is doing something like downloading child pornography, the business that owns the computer will be liable."
Aconley said the first defence for companies is prevention, with clearly spelled-out policies on computer use. He said that must be followed up with monitoring, with employees being made aware their actions can be tracked.
"The ideal situation is where everybody is told up front what is happening," he said. "Employers can say: "We putting software in place to monitor Internet usage,' and if employees know it will be monitored, they won't do things they shouldn't be doing.
"It has to be pre-emptive."
Source