More than one billion Facebook hits ‘from people at work’

Accessing and downloading content from Facebook and YouTube while at work still accounts for more corporate web activity and bandwidth usage than from any other sites, according to new figures from managed security company, Network Box.

Just over seven per cent of all hits from business networks are to Facebook, with Google the second most popular at four per cent. In the dataset used, Facebook clocked up 98 million more hits (totalling 1,008,046,041) in the second quarter of 2010 than it did in the first (which saw 909.710,076 hits), a rise of 10.8% in the quarter.
YouTube, while nowhere near Facebook or Google in terms of hits from corporate networks, has had a 10% increase in terms of the number of hits in quarter two compared to the first quarter of this year. However, it now uses 10.2% of the available corporate bandwidth. Five per cent of corporate bandwidth is used by Facebook – up from 4.5 per cent in quarter one.
For this survey, Network Box tracked 14 billion URLs and 225,000 GB of bandwidth usage between April and June 2010.
The top five websites (by the number of hits) visited from business addresses in Q2 2010 were:
Facebook 7.2%
Google 3.9%
Yimg (Yahoo’s image server) 2.9%
Yahoo 2.3%
Doubleclick 1.6%
The top five websites ranked by the bandwidth they use were:
YouTube 10.2%
Facebook 5%
Windows Updates 3.2%
Yimg (Yahoo’s image server) 2.9%
Google 2.5%
Simon Heron, Internet Security Analyst for Network Box, says: “It’s interesting to see that the same five websites are again in the top five urls and bandwidth consumers. Although many businesses now use social networks for work, it’s unlikely that they’re the top working priority for most employees. Clearly human factors, such as the desire to socialise while at work, play a large part.”
“These considerations are unlikely to change anytime soon. Businesses would be wise to factor them in to their network security and bandwidth management plans. Ultimately businesses need to acknowledge this new behaviour, and concentrate on how they control this, and on defending the corporate network against the increased risk factors.”
For more information on security issues, visit http://www.network-box.co.uk, see Simon Heron’s blog: http://blog.network-box.co.uk; or follow him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/networkbox.
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