IRELAND — According to a recent audit performed on more than 125 corporate and public sector networks by Irish IT firm PixAlert, 25.8-percent of the 10,000+ PCs “contained digital pornography or other inappropriate images,” the company reported in a press release issued Tuesday.PixAlert’s “sample audits” also found that more than 12-percent of email accounts and more than five-percent of the file servers shares scanned were “similarly affected.”

According to PixAlert, 46.8-percent were of the images scanned were “found to show full nudity or sexual activity,” while 0.3-percent were determined to be “illegal.” (PixAlert does not specify in what sense the images were “illegal” or by what country’s standard that assessment was made).

PixAlert further reports that 35-percent of the images found were “internet images,” while 45.2-percent were “sourced from emails.” Among the emails, 19.7-percent were outbound, while 35.5-percent were sent internally.

PixAlert representatives said that data culled from the audit shows that many employees continue to ignore company policies that prohibit them from viewing, downloading, and/or sharing pornography at work.

“With a over third of all images found created in the last 12 months it is clear that a significant number of employees continue to ignore corporate policies and in some cases are going to extraordinary lengths to bypass protection systems in order to obtain and distribute inappropriate material,” said Andy Churley, marketing director at PixAlert.

Churley said that part of the problem rests with a false comfort that filters and other user-end devices are sufficient to keep employees from indulging in porn viewing, idle surfing of inappropriate sites, and other unsanctioned corporate time-wasting hobbies.

“Corporate officers wrongly assume that boundary protection systems stop all digital pornography from entering the organization,” said Churley, adding that in his company’s experience “almost all corporations will have a significant amount of pornography on their networks.”

Not surprisingly, PixAlert – which offers for sale the very manner of services it recommends companies utilize to protect themselves – asserts that the “only effective way to detect, manage and eliminate these inappropriate images is by using powerful network audit or real-time monitoring solutions to enhance the traditional gateway solutions.”

PixAlert bills their image recognition software as a “high-speed image analysis engine” that “rapidly identifies digital pornography in over 150 different file types on all corporate IT resources such as PCs, file servers and email servers.”

Beyond what worries many corporate officers the most about porn in the office – the possibility of a sexual harassment or other manner of lawsuit – PixAlert asserts on its website that the “damage caused by exposure of an incident involving illegal or illicit images held on corporate computers can be much more extensive than the potential financial exposure of a civil law suit; damage to brand and reputation and threat of criminal proceedings against senior executives can significantly affect a company’s ability to trade.”

Given that kind of risk, Churley says, simply establishing anti-inappropriate-image policies simply isn’t enough.

“While all organizations actively discourage access to inappropriate images at work, our audits show that the reality is that all establishments have a lot of digital pornography residing on their networks that they don’t know about,” Churley said.