The following statistics highlight Internet abuse at work and how it affects a company's bottom line:

• A salaried employee earning $40,000 a year can cost his or her employer at least $5,000 a year just by playing around on the Internet for an hour a day.

• In a recent MSNBC survey of more 9,000 surfers who have visited sex sites, almost one in five said they viewed the sites while on the job.

• 1/3 of workers say they have played computer games during work hours (survey by Society of Financial Service Professionals).

• Quick Take survey revealed 70 percent of IT managers believe Internet monitoring and filtering software should be Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) within an organization.

• 67 percent of all Internet access occurs at work, and according to research, more than 1 million people gamble regularly online, and one in four are considered pathological.

• An upcoming study suggests that getting rid of the gossip, jokes, and other unproductive e-mail from colleagues can save up to 30 percent of the time an employee spends reading e-mail (Gartner Group).

• The average business e-mail user receives three spam messages a day, and in three years that number will swell to 40. According to Ferris Research, in 2003 we'll waste 15 hours deleting e-mail, compared to 2.2 hours in the year 2000. That will cost the average business in the future $400 per in-box, compared to $55 today.

• Employees spend an average of 49 minutes per day replying to e-mail, while 24 percent spend more than an hour a day checking their messages. Meanwhile, just 27 percent of the e-mail received required immediate attention. (Gartner Group)

• A recent US survey on the adoption of monitoring and filtering technologies in the workplace found that nearly 83% of overall respondents believe that employees use the company's Internet for personal use. Over 75% view Internet monitoring and filtering procedures as a necessity.

Taken from:www.8e6technologies.com/statistics/index.html