Shreya Biswas for Times News Network

New Delhi, Apr 21: Ever wondered by how much can your employees set you back with endless hours of net surfing? Employees, these days, are spending a lot of time on the internet, for information supposedly useful for their area of operation , but end up wandering into myriad of links.

These include general news sites, sports and entertainment, social networking sites and music download sites. This results in loss of productive hours, wasteful spends and huge financial losses to a company due to disruption of computer networks thanks to the menace of virus.

Websense, a global internet filtering and web security solutions provider, recently conducted a study for one of the topfive Indian companies with 5,000 employees. The results were startling and indicative of the problem corporate India faces. According to the study, the Delhi-based company loses about 28,000 working hours per month due to personal surfing. Break it up and you get an average loss of almost 8 hours a month per employee or a workday’s loss per month. Assuming an average salary package of Rs 3 lakh per annum per employee, the loss amounts to Rs 10,000 per employee every year.

Three years back, viruses that sneaked into systems (through mindless surfing) were aimed at disrupting computer networks or causing problems in computer software programs. Now, the focus has shifted to the spread of malicious codes for financial gains. This could be coming from the web and even tools like instant messaging and peer-to-peer software.

According to the case study, some of the top hacking sites which employees were hitting included serials.softkiller. .net,www.katzddl.com, www.phazeddl.com, www.crack.ms, et al. Malicious sites included, orlando .ebuddy.com, new.trafficsector.com, drivecleaner.com to name just a few. All these sites help the web attackers.