Most users do not see front-line activity and 'normal business usage' to be a contributing factor to network security; but it's not all about the back-end. Business behavior is a direct impact to business information system risks.

1. Network Threats A brief discussion of how security issues of concern at the corporate level are sneaking in on the backs of individual users ©2004 Dan Oblak - MacIndy.net

6. How to Fight Spam Strategically By Gary A. Bolles, CIO Insight December 2, 2003 “ Paul Judge, CTO of antispam vendor CipherTrust Inc., says spam comprises up to 61 percent of all in-bound corporate e-mail. “ Antispam service provider Brightmail Inc. claims that out of the 70 billion messages it processes every month for the 300 million users in its worldwide network, over 50 percent are spam. “ The country's biggest e-mail provider, America Online, claims it stops an average of more than 1.5 billion spam messages a day, spiking at times to more than 2.5 billion. “ Says Michelle Boggess, electronic data security coordinator for Pensacola, Fla.-based Baptist Health Care, a $743 million not-for-profit: ‘Some of our users were getting spammed so heavily that they were spending large amounts of their own time picking through e-mail. The deluge creates a huge drain on worker productivity.’”

11. IM Spam Expected to Triple March 28, 2004 By Robyn Greenspan “ The annoying unwanted messages that overflow inboxes are now also spreading onto desktops in the form of SPIM — spam over instant messaging (IM). The Radicati Group estimates that SPIM will account for roughly 5 percent of instant messages traversing public networks (consumer and corporate) by the end of 2004, tripling from 400 million messages in 2003 to 1.2 billion .” “ Pornographic messages make up the majority of SPIM at 70 percent, followed by ‘get rich’ schemes at 12 percent, product sales at 9 percent, and loans or finance messages at 5 percent, according to Radicati's research. Nearly all (90 percent) of SPIM messages are short one-line sentences followed by a URL, such as, ‘Hello, check out my Web cam at www.xxx.com.’ ” “ Increased awareness will help to alleviate the problem and Radicati recommends that users not click on unknown links that appear during an instant messaging session, and that businesses should refrain from publishing IM names in corporate directories.”