Personal internet use at work costs £200 billion

Survey by PandaLabs shows that almost 40 per cent of internet browsing at work is personal

Personal use of the internet accounts for almost an hour of employees’ time every day, which in 2005 resulted in losses over €300 billion (£200 billion), according to research by PandaLabs.

Twenty one per cent of mail received by companies is spam and five per cent of all Internet traffic is infected with malware, causing average annual losses of €136,000 (£91,630) per company.

In addition, almost 40 per cent of internet use in companies is non-work related. In fact, most visits to pornographic web pages occur during working hours, with two out of every three visits to pornographic web pages occuring during working hours.

The average annual cost of computer attacks on companies without adequate security devices has soared due to productivity loss, bandwidth consumption and time dedicated by IT staff to cleaning the network.