40 pc IT admins 'pry on emails of employees'

Melbourne, Apr 15 (ANI): About 40 percent of IT administrators go snooping through the emails of their employees, particularly those of high-level executives, it has been revealed.

A company's IT admins have access to virtually every document company-wide - including executive files, payroll information and medical data - and many "can't help themselves" in gaining access to emails, says Carlo Minassian, founder and CEO of Earthwave, the North Sydney-based firm that is hired by organisations looking to outsource their IT security.

Minassian, who also often hunts down people who are breaching IT policy within an organisation, says leaving IT admins unsupervised is like putting "Dracula in charge of the blood bank".

He said IT administrators snooping on email happened "regularly", went "unnoticed" in most instances, and added that it would continue to go unnoticed unless an IT admin had something to prove. Only when they get caught do police get involved.

"We know that 40 percent of IT email administrators and IT managers look inside their manager's, their board's, their chief information officer's, and chief executive officer's emails regularly and read their email," the Age quoted Minassian as saying.

"So we catch people doing that where it's not the person that that email belongs to and so we alert the owner of the business or the security manager or whoever has contracted us," he said. (ANI)