Cisco warms firms about remote worker risks

Networking firm Cisco has released its annual study into the threat landscape associated with mobile and remote workers. It found that a lack of awareness about the issues involved heightens enterprise risk of exposure to security losses.

Two thousand mobile workers, and their employers, were polled in the study. These were pulled from a variety of industries and from a selection of ten countries, including the UK, US, France, Germany, Japan and Brazil. Cisco said that the range of countries was chosen to reflect the differences of opinion held in a variety of locations.

The results reference a report from analysts Gartner that found that the number of remote workers is growing. According to that report, released in 2007 the number of people working from home at least one day a month is likely to be 46.6m in 2011.

"Remote access and distributed workforces are here to say" said John N Stewart chief security officer at Cisco, in a statement.

The survey found that IT managers believe that their remote employees are becoming less disciplined in their online behaviour when outside of the office. More than half said that they suspected that staff were less diligent, an eleven per cent gain against the previous year.

According to Cisco these concerns are well placed. Risky behaviour currently happening outside of offices includes the opening of attachments and emails from unknown and suspicious sources. Forty eight percent of workers polled in the UK admitted to having such an attitude towards opening messages. While more and more people each year are admitting to using their work machines for non-work purposes.