Porn Surfing Corporate Execs Wreak Malware Havoc on Security Geeks

Porn-surfing executives are a pretty big problem for corporate IT types. That’s what ThreatTrack Security discovered when it commissioned a survey of 200 security professionals, asking them what kind of problems they’ve had to deal with. “Forty percent of them said they’ve had to clean their senior leadership team member’s devices because it was infected […]
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Porn-surfing executives are a pretty big problem for corporate IT types.

That's what ThreatTrack Security discovered when it commissioned a survey of 200 security professionals, asking them what kind of problems they've had to deal with.

"Forty percent of them said they've had to clean their senior leadership team member's devices because it was infected by going to a porn site," says Brian Alberti, a spokesman for the company.

But porn-born malware isn't the biggest problem. A higher percentage of respondents said they'd had to deal with infections that came via malicious email links (56 percent) and family members who were noodling around with corporate devices (45 percent).

The survey shows that a lot of security pros spend a pretty decent chunk of their time fixing problems that could be easily avoided, ThreatTrack says.

Depending on the device that gets infected, these infections can be really costly. If a computer that contains sensitive customer data is compromised, that typically triggers a data breach notification. By one estimate (pdf), data breach notifications cost $188 per compromised record.

The ThreatTrack survey found that most breaches are never disclosed. Still, numbers like that quickly add up to million dollar breach notification bills -- something that should be on every porn-surfing executive's mind.