Employees Are Great at Circumventing IT Security Policies
According to a survey conducted by Palo Alto Networks and quoted by DarkReading, employees in most enterprises are constantly circumventing corporate security policies by deploying unauthorized applications, including video viewers, streaming audio, P2P, and Google applications.
Palo Alto Networks used data from 20 different enterprises, gathered during vulnerability assessments, to reach the study results.
Employees are using a broad variety of tactics for circumventing IT policies on network usage, Palo Alto found. For example, approximately 80 percent of the enterprises are supporting proxy applications, such as KProxy or CGI proxies, which mask the user’s identity and surfing habits from IT monitoring tools.
“There’s no business reason for using proxies in the enterprise, other than to hide your activity from IT,” Mullaney says. “But we see at least some use of them in most of the enterprises we [assess].”
