Looking for the coolest jobs in IT? A new survey of information technology and network security specialists suggests that the place to look is on the front lines of cyberspace — and that the variety of work is greater than many might suspect.

 

The survey was conducted by the SANS Institute, the IT security training and research organization. The results will be published later this year in the form of an information booklet aimed at interesting students to consider a career in IT security.

The institute asked information security practitioners in government and non-government positions to describe their jobs and the most interesting aspects about working in them. It also asked security specialists to select which jobs they thought were “very cool.”

The top-ranking “coolest” IT security jobs according to government security employees:

1. Information security crime investigator/forensics expert.
Why it’s cool: “The thrill of the hunt! You never encounter the same crime twice!”

2. System, network and/or Web penetration tester.
Why it’s cool: “You can be a hacker, but do it legally and get paid a lot of money!” “The power to understand how systems can be penetrated and misused is something less than 1 percent of people in the entire security industry know, let alone the average citizen.”

3. Forensics analyst
Why it’s cool: “It’s CSI for cyber geeks!” “It’s like being one of the good spies on James Bond.” “Trying to find evidence without altering the system and maintaining the chain of evidence is challenging.”

4. (Tie) Incident response, incident handler
Why it’s cool: “This may be the top of the ‘top gun’ jobs because it lets you move into a cooler, analytical environment where you can go deep with your knowledge.” “You get visibility with your organization when they happen.” “Like the secret agent of tech geekdom.”

4. (Tie) Security architect
Why it’s cool: “You get to design the solution, and not just for the perimeter.” “You get to work with all the tech experts as a team, to plan the technology directions.” “You get to research and play with new ‘toys’ all the time.”

6. Vulnerability researcher
Why it’s cool: “You get to tear apart malware and find out how it ticks.” “Reverse engineers take a deep look into code segments to determine what is really happening under the hood.” “It’s a very exclusive club.”

7. (Tie) Network security engineer
Why it’s cool: “If there’s one person indispensable, it’s the network person.” “This is where the action is and where everything is in a state of flux with newer and newer technology.”

7. (Tie) Security analyst
Why it’s cool: “This job has influence at the top of the organization.” “If you want to make a difference but don’t necessarily want all the managerial BS, this is the job for you.” “It is the only clear path to the real top gun of security: chief information security officer.”

7. (Tie) Sworn law enforcement officer specializing in information security crime
Why it’s cool: “Ability to catch the bad guys … the end result is a rush.” “This is where the geeks among us can really show up the jocks.” “Security specialist and you get to carry a gun!”

10. (Tie) CISO/ISO or director of security
Why it’s cool: “I can get a lot done with little to no push back.” “You get to decide where to build the ‘watch towers,’ how many rangers are stationed in the park, where fires can be safely built, and the rules of engagement.”

10. (Tie) Application penetration tester
Why it’s cool: “You’re an ‘ethical hacker.’” “It takes equal parts technical ability and creativity,” “Combines applying different thought processes to system analysis with exploration tools, and a sort of dangerous level of knowledge.”

The next highest ranking positions:

• Security operations center analyst
• Prosecutor specializing in information security crime
• Technical director and deputy CISO
• Firewall/IPS administrator
• Security evangelist
• Vulnerability assessment analyst
• Security auditor
• Security assessment consultant
• Technical security teacher
• Security savvy software developer
• Security maven in the application developer organization
• Disaster recovery/business continuity analyst/manager

“Of particular interest to me,” observed Alan Paller, the SANS Institute’s Director of Research, “are the low rankings that government people give the CISOs.” The chief information security officer position “ranked much higher in the non-government world.”

He also noted the high ranking that non-government people give application penetration testing, “illuminating the fact that the government hasn’t yet focused [as much as commercial organizations] on the critical new attack vector of application-based attacks,” he said.

The top-ranking “coolest” IT security jobs according to non-government security employees:

1. (Tie) System, Network, and/or Web penetration tester
1. (Tie) Information security crime investigator/forensics expert
3. Forensics analyst
4. Vulnerability researcher
5. Application penetration tester
6. Security architect
7. CISO/ISO or director of security
8. (Tie) Incident response, incident handler
8. (Tie) Sworn law enforcement officer specializing in information security crime
10. Security evangelist

I’ve learned about this event in one of the announcements in PHP User Groups Philippines.  Sounds interesting.  I haven’t used or installed WordPress as CMS but I want to try it.  That’s why I’m joining WordCamp Philippines 2008. I know this will open opportunities for me by joining this event.  I’m a newbie in this thing but this will be a good chance for me to join bloggers and developers alike using WordPress.  

 

Event info:

WordCamp Philippines 2008, September 6, 2008 Saturday

Augusto-Rosario Gonzalez Theater
5th Floor, Mutien Building
De La Salle – College of St. Benilde
Taft Avenue, Manila

 

This event would not be possible without the help of the following sponsors:  

·     .PH: the Domain for Individuals

·     Free Online Flash Games

·     Wazzup Manila Philippines

·     Real Estate CRM

·     Real Estate Website Designers

·     Orange County Real Estate

·     Auto Insurance Quotes

·     Lane Systems Inc.

·     RedMedia 

 

 

 

For additional information, visit the following:

 

WordCamp Philippines 2008

Mindanao Bloggers

 

There are plenty of freelancers among the ranks of web workers, myself included. The web makes it easy for us to work with clients located all over the place, as well as to make the connections that lead to new clients. But being a web-based freelancer can be isolating: it’s hard to know how you’re doing compared to your peers if you never actually meet them. That’s one reason I was interested to read the 55-page report from FreelanceSwitch with the summary of their survey of 3700 freelancers worldwide.

Among their key findings:

• An astounding 89% of respondents describe themselves as happier since freelancing.
• 33% earn more as freelancer than they did full-time. 43% earn less. (The remainder never worked full-time in their industry.)
• A slight majority – 55% – feel more secure as a freelancer.
• 45% of respondents are socking away money in a retirement fund, and 65% have health insurance.   
• Only 10% have business insurance.
• 85% work at home.
• Referrals and portfolio web sites are the most popular ways to get work, followed by internet job sites. Only 15% maintain a blog.

It’s tempting to draw conclusions from the raw numbers. Indeed, the full report – available for a donation if you didn’t participate in the survey – has some well-done analysis sections, looking at things like the factors that correlate with happiness and income. But before staking too much of your career on this survey, you need to keep two things in mind:

1.        The survey sample was self-selected, since the survey was open to anyone reading the FreelanceSwitch web site. This means that you can’t properly extrapolate the numbers to be representative of some “freelancers as a whole” group. Indeed, looking at some of the results gives hints as to how the numbers might be skewed. For instance, 67% of the respondents are either web designers or graphic designers. This doesn’t make the results invalid, but it does mean that you need to be cautious drawing conclusions.

2.        There’s a strong temptation, when presented with demographics plus numbers on things like happiness and income, to indulge in post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. Just because two factors appear to correlate does not mean that one causes the other. You can’t, for example, conclude that freelancing makes people happier just because most freelancers in the survey were happy. It could just as well be that people who are happy are predisposed to freelancing – or that some other factor (owning high-end computers?) predisposes people to both freelance and to be happy.

Of course, I want to believe some of the conclusions that I could leap to from this survey: that freelancers are happy with life even when they’re not drawing in tons of money, for example. But that’s because those things accord with my own prejudices. But at the very least, if you’re on the fence about freelancing, this is a worthwhile collection of data to review. The numbers are large enough to be significant (3700 participants), and the overall picture of the freelance life is rosy – which, after all, is the way that many of us experience it.

 

The likelihood of Second Life having a long-term impact on the enterprise may appear virtually nonexistent, but consider this: Education, collaboration, and networking — three productivity mandates for today’s enterprise — are fast catching on in the virtual world.

 

Before laughing and glancing sideways at your well-worn copy of Snow Crash, know that even old-guard institutions such as Harvard University have a Second Life presence, with virtual campuses where learning, discussion, and content creation occur.

 

Training, for one, has real ROI potential in Second Life, as virtual worlds expose participants to RL (real life) learning scenarios that would otherwise be too expensive or dangerous to explore. Take dealing with a pandemic flu, for example. Medical students are already tapping virtual worlds to learn how best to respond. No need to pay for a trip to a foreign country to learn language basics. Virtual immersive language study allows you to travel to worlds where only that language is spoken, with all signs and advertisements written in the language being learned.

 

Collaboration and networking are two other sweet spots for companies to make use of virtual worlds. Tech heavy hitters such as Dell, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems are already tapping Second Life as a platform for development, conferences, and forums. IBM, which has established a Business Center in Second Life, boasts nearly 4,000 employees with Second Life avatars to date, with about 1,000 routinely conducting company business inside Second Life.

 

But what of the many technologies already serving companies’ collaboration, networking, and training needs? How can virtual worlds find a long-term place in the mix?

 

And that is the immeasurable edge virtual worlds may have over traditional modes of training and collaboration: user engagement. Perhaps more so, as Generation Y grows up with virtual technologies such as Second Life.

 

Of course, anonymity, which people tend to prefer in the virtual world, hinders collaboration carryover into the real world. Moreover, plugging in to Second Life for business-grade collaboration has other detractors, such as quality of experience (SL is consistently slowing down and crashing for a variety of reasons), privacy (often, depending on the type of conversation, others can “hear” you), and security. But as the technology matures, these issues will no doubt be addressed.

 

Either way, crackpot or not, tapping virtual worlds such as Second Life in a corporate setting has already drawn significant interest.

 

New data released by Hitwise shows that there is a socio-economic difference between those frequently using Yahoo and those more frequently using Google.

The graph right demonstrates “Online Representation” based on demographic types. The Y axis represents Yahoo, the X axis Google, with the higher the number, the more that particular group of users uses each service. Yahoo is strong in “struggling societies,” “blue collar backbone,” and “remote America,” where as Google obtains higher use in “small town contentment,” “affluent suburbia,” and “upscale cities.”  

The differences between the groups aren’t great, but the results do go some way in explaining the Yahoo conundrum. Although a distance second in search, Yahoo has remained the number one traffic destination online ahead of Google, so you’d think with more traffic Yahoo would convert that traffic into similar returns to Google. But alas we know that not to be the case, and that would appear in part to be related to people using Yahoo not spending as much online and being in poorer demographic categories than Google users, providing a lower return per user.

Update: unlike some of the class warriors in our comments, just to reiterate: these figures are not exclusive, ie: lower demographics use Google as well and higher demographics use Yahoo, it simply points out that according to Hitwise there is a weight either way among users of both services. That is an interesting split, both when considering yields per user on each site, and in a broader sense which services appeal to these different groups. There’s nothing discriminatory is pointing out data from a third party, and those suggesting this is some sort of class based conspiracy say more about themselves than this post. All data is good if it helps us understand markets and in this case the user base on two of the largest internet companies there is.

 

Microsoft Corp. may be the world’s largest software vendor, but it would also top most outside counts of the number of crimes committed against good coding practices.

Whether it’s for shipping software too late (Windows Vista, SQL Server 2005) or too early (Windows ME), releasing products that are too insecure (Outlook Express 5.5 and 6.0, Internet Explorer 5.5) or too locked-down (Vista again), making too few changes (Visual Studio 2003) or too radical of an alteration (Office 2007′s ribbon interface), or writing code that is too bloated and complicated (Vista one more time) or too dumbed-down (Bob), Microsoft rarely catches a break from its critics.

Obviously, it’s not that Microsoft lacks for talent among its 31,000 developers. But the sheer size of the company’s programming workforce, and the number, heft and widespread popularity of its products, conspire to create an environment that can be inconducive to efficient coding.

If you believe executives within Microsoft’s server and tools division, though, the software vendor has become a much more agile developer over the past few years.

Led by that unit, which is still known internally by its old acronym STB (for the server and tools business), Microsoft has embraced new development tactics to help its programmers get products to market faster while also writing better code and being more responsive to feedback from users.

What sort of tactics? Things such as gathering feedback from users before embarking on the writing of any code; replacing or augmenting the conventional model of alpha and beta releases with its Community Technology Preview (CTP) program, which uses a “release early, release often” approach to testing software in the field; and creating independent “feature crews” that can quickly build specific features and communicate directly with users about them.

“I don’t know that there was an ‘Aha!’ moment,” Soma Somasegar, senior vice president in charge of Microsoft’s development tools, said in an interview this month. “We just realized that we’re building products for customers, not just for technology’s sake. So the sooner we could engage with our customers, the better we could make it from an architecture, feature, quality and scalability perspective — all of the things that customers care about.”

That transformation, which began four years ago, will culminate on Wednesday, when Microsoft formally launches the 2008 versions of Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio — each of which was developed using some or all of the new techniques listed above — at an event in Los Angeles.

Skeptics still abound. For one thing, they point out that despite Microsoft’s newfound commitment to user feedback and development flexibility, actually releasing the three new products simultaneously didn’t turn out to be possible.

Visual Studio 2008 has been available since November, while Windows Server 2008 was released to manufacturing earlier this month. Meanwhile, RTM on SQL Server 2008 was recently delayed until this year’s third quarter, one quarter later than previously planned — although Microsoft did issue what it described as a “feature-complete” CTP release of the database last Wednesday.

“Aligning the launch date was a PR exercise,” said Greg DeMichillie, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft in Kirkland, Wash. DeMichillie, who worked as a developer within the STB for a decade, also remains unconvinced that Microsoft is now a paragon of agile development.

“Clearly, CTPs and the other changes deliver a benefit,” he said. “Users get earlier glimpses of products, and Microsoft gets feedback earlier. But the jury is still out on whether Microsoft is going to ship software more quickly and reliably as a result.”

John Andrews, CEO of Evans Data Corp., a market research firm that focuses on development tools, said via e-mail that Web-centric vendors such as Google Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc. are both much more nimble when it comes to software development, and that even IBM tops Microsoft in agility.

“I believe Microsoft attempts to do agile programming where possible, but the reality of its situation is that the complexity and size of the code base prevents it from truly implementing that coding process,” Andrews wrote. “Now it’s a matter of making itself semiagile wherever possible.”

But Microsoft officials argue that being agile has less to do with shaving some time off of a product release schedule than it does with being able to ship higher-quality software in the first release of a product.

Users who hear that kind of talk “may roll their eyes” because of the shipment delay on SQL Server 2008, acknowledged Ted Kummert, a Microsoft corporate vice president who heads development of the database. “But we are driven by the end quality we feel we have to deliver, which lives on far after the RTM party we have on campus,” he said. The CTP release of SQL Server 2008 that became available last week was the sixth issued thus far by Kummert’s team.

The SQL Server and Visual Studio development teams have switched over completely to CTPs, which are interim software builds that provide a faster opportunity for feedback from users but aren’t supported as extensively by Microsoft as full-fledged beta releases are. The Windows Server group used a combination of betas and CTPs during the development of Windows Server 2008, according to Microsoft officials.

Another key element of Microsoft’s development process for enterprise products is its Technology Adoption Programs, which let companies get extensive handholding from the software vendor as they test and then go live with beta or CTP releases in production environments. Microsoft’s customer service and support team manage the TAPs, and the company gathers feedback from participants both in the form of informal comments and more quantitative survey-type data, said Rich Kaplan, a vice president in the customer service unit.

Some users who have worked with the prerelease versions of the new products during the latest development cycle said that they noticed an increase in responsiveness and flexibility on the part of Microsoft.

“Almost everything that we asked for while testing SQL Server 2008 is now in the final product,” said Umit Nazlica, database systems manager at Garanti Bank, a banking and financial services firm in Istanbul, Turkey, that is taking part in the TAP for the new database. For instance, IT staffers at Garanti requested stronger resource management and governance capabilities, as well as data compression and encryption improvements, Nazlica said.

The bank, which runs 140 instances of Microsoft’s database with 11TB of data, also participated in the TAP for the current SQL Server 2005 release. The testing process has been much better this time around, according to Nazlica. “We had a lot more time to evaluate the product,” he said. “And we were more experienced about how to work directly with the people at Microsoft.”

Microsoft’s development teams “truly are listening and really take into account what is said,” said Michael Ruminer, an agile development consultant in Boston and a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional with a focus on its Visual Studio Team System software. “They don’t take on a hubris in the product development that they know best.”

Agile development can’t simply be mandated from above by management, Ruminer said. But he added that when he talks to developers at Microsoft, he gets the sense that their managers are taking real action by removing obstacles to agility and needless process requirements. And he said that the company has made significant improvements to the Visual Studio testing suite after outside developers complained about it — a step that Ruminer saw as evidence of Microsoft’s increased responsiveness.

He did note, though, that there is “a lot of discussion about whether Microsoft is actually pushing out CTPs too quickly.” That leaves some users and third-party developers feeling overwhelmed, and pressured to try all of the releases, Ruminer said. But to him, the upsides outweigh the potential negatives. “No one is forcing you to install the CTPs,” he said.

Microsoft hasn’t always been so responsive. For most of its history, the company adhered strictly to a development philosophy called Zero Defect, according to DeMichillie. Although that approach didn’t explicitly forbid the company’s development teams from using agile techniques, it demanded that they fix bugs before writing any new code, on the theory that fixing something right away would cost less in both time and money than addressing it later in the development process would.

Nor did Microsoft actively seek out advice from users. “Until about three or four years ago,” Somasegar said, “our philosophy for the most part was, ‘I know what I’m building is right for you. So as soon as I have something I think is ready, let me give it to you. And then I’ll wait for your validation that I’ve done the right thing.’”

“And the feedback that we wanted was, ‘Here are some bugs,’” added Bill Laing, general manager of Microsoft’s Windows Server division. “It wouldn’t change the product.”

In addition to adopting the CTP process, the Visual Studio and SQL Server teams have done away with siloed teams of developers, testers and customer support workers wherever possible. Both adopted what Kummert described as a “feature crew” model, with smaller teams made up of five to 12 employees — typically, a program manager along with a few developers and testers. “That way, a group can really own a particular feature,” he said.

Somasegar said that using a feature crew approach, he was able to fast-track the development of some Visual Studio 2008 features related to building Office 2007 applications so they could be released in a service pack update for Visual Studio 2005 at the same time that the new desktop suite was released early last year.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s customer service organization has been enlisted by the STB units to gather and analyze feedback from early users. Kaplan said the findings are then shared with development managers at so-called Red Zone meetings that “absolutely help drive release decisions.” The name was chosen, he noted, to emphasize the importance of bugs that need to be fixed before products are ready to ship.

Not everything fits perfectly into the CTP model. Laing said the Windows Server team will continue to rely on formal beta releases, even though they take longer for Microsoft to produce and for users to install. “I think it’s a much bigger thing for a tester to roll out a piece of infrastructure like Windows Server,” Laing said. “So we release both CTPs and betas, but we offer better support for betas to encourage testers to actually go into production with them.”

That process worked well for Continental Airlines Inc. during the development of Windows Server 2008, said Dawn Getteau, a system architect at the Houston-based airline. “The release cycle was just right for Continental,” Getteau said. “Even though we deployed the Windows Server 2008 beta in our production environment, it takes time to go through our change management, testing and validation process.”

And Microsoft has also set clear limits on how flexible it is willing to get. For instance, despite last week’s announcement that the company would release the details of some of its key APIs and communications protocols to rival vendors and open-source developers, Somasegar said he has no plans to accept external contributions to the source code of Microsoft’s .Net programming framework.

“We want you to be successful, which is why we’ll give you access to the .Net source code,” he said. “But I don’t know how to take input from a bunch of outsiders, pull it together and ship it in a timely manner as part of a product and then say to customers, ‘Hey, please take a bet on running your business or home with this software.’”

 

1. Start the Registry Editor
2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Classes \ Local Settings \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ Shell \ Bags
3. From the menu, click Edit > New > Key
4. Name the new key AllFolders (and keep this key selected)
5. From the menu, click Edit > New > Key
6. Name the new key Shell (and keep this key selected)
7. From the menu, click Edit > New > String Value
8. Name the new value FolderType, right-click it and choose Modify. Enter NotSpecified as the Value data. Close the registry editor

 

A new survey  finds that among two-thirds of companies polled, it is “improbable” that an IT project will be considered an overall success due to inadequately or improperly gathered business requirements.

 

Fifty percent of these companies’ projects could be termed “runaways,” marked by at least two of these three factors: Taking more than 180 percent of estimated time to be completed, going over 160 percent of the established budget, and delivering less than 70 percent of the desired capabilities.

 

The other 32 percent of the companies surveyed enjoy a “probable” chance of success for IT project, according to the study.

Good requirements analysis can ensure a project’s scale is minimized, but not at the expense of meeting a business’ needs, according to the study. Another hallmark sees changes to requirements occurring infrequently, because the proper level of consensus has already been reached.

 

The damage was worst when non-IT business analysts were in charge of the requirements. Those projects came in at nearly double their budgets and took more than 245 percent of their allotted time.

 

When IT workers managed the requirements analysis, the results were only slightly better, with budget overruns at 163 percent and time at 172 percent.

 

The best results came when business and IT worked together on defining requirements. There, budgets ran an average of 143 percent and time, 159 percent.

 

The study suggested many companies are working on an ad-hoc basis. More than half “did not have professional, trained staff dedicated to the function of getting requirements, and the vast majority view the process of getting requirements to be inefficient,” the report states.

 

Companies should form a “center of excellence” for business-requirements gathering managed by both IT and business employees, the study concluded.

A modern, global enterprise is incredibly complex. Balancing materials availability forecasts with predicted sales trends and seasonal marketing strategies can seem like pure wizardry. But what if you had some help, in the form of a massive electronic brain that could handle the number-crunching for you?

 

Until recently, supercomputers were the exclusive domain of large universities and government research labs. Massive, arcane, and impossibly expensive, they required operational and maintenance skills far beyond the capabilities of your average enterprise IT department. But new developments in HPC (high-performance computing) technology are putting supercomputer-level performance within the enterprise’s reach. The only question is, does the enterprise have use for it?

The HPC field has changed dramatically over the past decade. Today, distributed-processing software allows even desktop PCs to join compute clusters and crunch numbers in their idle moments. Networked parallel processing technology makes it possible to build supercomputer-class systems from mainstream, off-the-shelf hardware and open source software. And in the past few years, companies such as IBM and Sun Microsystems have begun offering time-shared HPC services at affordable rates.

 

This is great news for the oil and gas, finance, and insurance industries, which have long relied on HPC for intensive calculations and complex mathematical modeling. But for more typical enterprises, supercomputing technology remains a tough sell. The promise is enticing, but the hurdles to overcome call into question the number of businesses that realistically need to perform calculations on the order of those necessary to predict global weather patterns or model the stock market.

 

And cost is not the only barrier to entry for HPC. Before any massively parallel supercomputing application can run, it first needs a data set to process. As any IT manager can attest, enterprise data is too often scattered throughout multiple, disparate systems, each with its own interface and data formats. As the growing market for data integration and SOA (service-oriented architecture) technology attests, unifying this data is no easy task. Relying on it for serious computational modeling is out of the question.

So, while raw processing power may be available and affordable like never before, don’t expect HPC to become a line item on your budget anytime soon. For most enterprise IT departments, those dollars will be better spent on traditional expenditures such as middleware and data warehousing, leaving mass-market supercomputing relegated to the category of the possible, but impractical.

Think you can get away with using e-mail and the Internet in violation of company policy? Think again.

 

A new survey found that more than a quarter of employers have fired workers for misusing e-mail, and one third have fired workers for misusing the Internet on the job. The study, conducted by the American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy Institute, surveyed 304 U.S. companies of all sizes.

 

 

The vast majority of bosses who fired workers for Internet misuse, 84 percent, said the employee was accessing porn or other inappropriate content. While looking at inappropriate content is an obvious no-no on company time, simply surfing the Web led to a surprising number of firings. As many as 34 percent of managers in the study said they let go of workers for excessive personal use of the Internet, according to the survey.

 

 

Among managers who fired workers for e-mail misuse, 64 percent did so because the employee violated company policy and 62 percent said the workers’ e-mail contained inappropriate or offensive language. More than a quarter of bosses said they fired workers for excessive personal use of e-mail and 22 percent said their workers were fired for breaching confidentiality rules in e-mail.

 

 

Companies are worried about the inappropriate use of the Internet, and so 66 percent of those in the study said they monitor Internet connections. As many as 65 percent of them use software to block inappropriate Web sites. Eighteen percent of the companies block URLs to prevent workers from visiting external blogs.

 

 

Companies use different methods to monitor workers’ computers, with 45 percent of those participating in the survey tracking content, keystrokes, and time spent at the keyboard. An additional 43 percent store and review computer files. Twelve percent monitor blogs to track content about the company, and 10 percent monitor social-networking sites.

Companies are keen to track employee e-mail and Internet behavior in part due to legal fears. According to research done by the AMA and ePolicy in 2006, 24 percent of companies in the study had e-mail subpoenaed by courts, and another 15 percent have faced lawsuits based on employee e-mails.

 

 

The researchers found that even though only two states require companies to notify their workers that they’re monitoring them, most tell employees of their monitoring activities. Of the companies that monitor workers in the survey, 83 percent said they tell employees that they are monitoring content, keystrokes, and time spent at the keyboard. As many as 84 percent tell employees that they review computer activity, and 71 percent alert workers that they monitor their e-mails.