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By Polly Raymond, 10 November 1998 00:25

NEWS Almost half of European corporations are leaving their email systems open to outsiders because they protect them with software packages full of well-known security holes, according to a survey from NTA Monitor. A spokesman for the security consultancy said: "It's just a matter of bad housekeeping because although updates and replacements are easily available, many of the corporations we surveyed just hadn't bothered to ensure their servers are secure." The company, which conducts regular audits over the Net, tested 16,000 corporations across 11 European countries. The spokesman explained: "We just send an email to the server and it comes back with all the information we need to identify which software the company is using to protect its email server." The testing ran between June and October this year, and found that on average, 42 per cent of Unix based email servers are unsafe because most corporations are running old versions of Sendmail software on them. An average of 41 per cent of NT-based servers were plagued by old versions of NTMail and Exchange - both of which generally do not include recent, well-publicised updates and fixes - according to the report. NTA's spokesman said researchers had been shocked by extent to which security has been neglected, especially considering that email confidentiality is so important. He warned that hackers could easily gain access to commercially sensitive material and could even take control of the servers. Another company spokesman said the conditions are particularly serious for any organisation embarking on an ecommerce project where email security is central to a watertight legal position.