You are here: Home » Adult Webmaster News » Paper: Workplace Porn-Watchers Are Threat to Nation'...
Select year   and month 
 
May 12, 2014

Paper: Workplace Porn-Watchers Are Threat to Nation's Security

LOS ANGELES—The Washington Times is reporting that recent cases uncovered via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests indicate that "porn in the federal workplace poses a security risk, giving computer viruses inroads to attack government servers." The security risk is allegedly created by unauthorized access to porn sites and other online destinations run by people whose intent is less the spread of porn than it is the spread of malicious viruses that then surruptitiously gather information. In one case uncovered through FOIA, reported the Times, "A General Services Administration employee visited dating websites, scoured the Internet for pornography and even maintained a user account at an X-rated social networking site. "Ultimately, a computer virus from a porn site infected the employee’s email, sending a mass message to everyone in the account’s GSA address book titled 'check out my pictures,' according to records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act," it added. Security experts told the paper that cases like that underscore the nature of the threat posed to the network infrastructures of government agencies that records show have had porn-watching employees, including the Treasury Department, the Postal Service and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to name a few. “It’s a big problem everywhere,” said Sharon Nelson, president of computer forensics firm Sensei Enterprises. “Many [free porn sites] are run by cybercriminals who are less interested in pornography than spreading the malware. If they give away free porn and they can inject malware, they can make a lot more money from the information they derive.” The problem, she added, is not relegated to the public sector; many private employers also find themselves between a rock and a hard place, especially when it comes to making hard decisions about otherwise valuable porn-watching employees. "We have actually done audits of particular individuals where the individual was so valuable that people didn’t want to fire them, but yet they can’t stop looking at pornography,” she said of an unidentified private-sector client. That conundrum is compounded because of the relative ease of circumventing porn filters via proxy servers, even at work. The article does not explain the exact manner by which watching porn at work translates into a serious risk to the nation's security, which seems like a relatively grandiose claim, but the implication seems to be that oblivious porn surfers visiting free sites more interested in collecting data from unsuspecting visitors that selling porn could expose entire networks, and the data they contain, to people with the ability to carry their nefarious plans through to completion. That right there would appear to be a serious enough problem without escalating the situation to an existential threat to the nation's digital infrastructure.

 
home | register | log in | add URL | add premium URL | forums | news | advertising | contact | sitemap
copyright © 1998 - 2009 Adult Webmasters Association. All rights reserved.