Senior executives innundated with e-mail also often defeat their own corporate security systems by forwarding messages to their home PCs to read later, he says. We find senior executives don't have time during the day to read all those messages, so what they're doing is using mail forwarding to send those messages to their home PCs via the Internet. A lot of that information could be confidential and it's not appropriately protected. Encryption software may not be used . . . There's a risk that it could be accessed.
Hackers also can use that home connection as a back door to break into the corporate system.
An alternative is to establish a secured extranet between the company and selected home computers, with the caveat that users not be allowed to dial up a public ISP at the same time they're connected to the corporate system. At the very least, people can download a firewall to protect their home systems. Firewalls act like a fence to keep intruders out and to channel electronic access through a portal that can be monitored. The newest corporate security systems don't allow employees to turn them off easily, or to neglect regular virus checks. Doug MacPherson, security-sales executive with Tivoli Systems Canada,a division of IBM, says people may feel too busy to do a full virus scan on their PC every couple of weeks the way a good security policy requires.