Nearly two-thirds of UK businesses do not look after their Internet security effectively, according to new research. A survey undertaken by Network Box, found that just over 65 per cent of companies spend ‘no time’ managing their security systems (anti-virus, anti-spam, content filtering, VPN, intrusion detection and web usage and bandwidth policies). Nearly 15 (14.7) per cent spend less than 30 minutes per week managing their IT security.

Just over half (54 per cent) of companies don’t have a web usage monitoring policy in place to manage bandwidth. And yet nearly 70 per cent of companies said they regularly notice a slow-down in web access speeds. Productivity is affected, too: companies surveyed estimated that, on average, they could save around half and hour of time per day, per employee, if 80 per cent of non-work-related web usage was stopped.

The survey also found that more than one third (37.3 per cent) of companies still don’t protect themselves from phishing attacks, despite the growth in phishing attacks over the last three years.

The Network Box survey is based on 440 responses from companies between 200 and 10,000 employees.