The report analyzed 8 billion web requests during March and found that roaming laptop users are much more likely to try to access illegal file sharing sites, porn sites and other questionable content.
This surfing behavior puts employers at risk of legal liability and exposure to malware.
“If your employees are using a corporate-issued laptop to download illegal music files from home, your organization could be liable,” said Dan Nadir, vice president of product strategy at ScanSafe.
ScanSafe reports that many companies are not securing their remote workers’ web access and that extending security solutions for these laptop users is complex, hard to maintain, expensive and falls short of offering full roaming protection.
Key findings show that remote workers visit adult websites 2.5 times more often than do their in-office counterparts. They are also 5.2 times more likely to visit extreme websites that contain highly graphic content.
Remote workers also visit illegal file-sharing sites 8.5 times more often than do their in-office counterparts, and sites that promote illegal activities, such as bomb-making, nearly four times as often.
“It’s no surprise that web-browsing habits change when employees are outside of the physical confines of their office and away from the watchful eye of supervisors and colleagues,” Nadir said. “What is surprising is that there is such a huge increase in requests for what most organizations would deem highly offensive sites and in some cases illegal content — including the download of copyrighted material.”
Interestingly, there is one category of sites that remote employees are less likely to visit when they are out of the office — banking sites. According to the data, roaming employees are 66 percent less likely to visit an online banking site.
ScanSafe offers Anywhere+, a software-as-a-service the company claims provides real-time protection from malware and enforcement of acceptable Internet usage policies for all users surfing the web, regardless of location.