In recent years there have been repeated instances of employees abusing work resources to view objectionable (or even illegal) content, usually pornography.  High profile cases include Judges, Headmasters, Police Officers and even a large number of staff in New Zealand’s largest school. Most interesting about these cases is not the fact that they were made public, but that they happened at all. The organisations concerned had “state of the art” preventative measures in place. Why did these measures fail to protect the organisations and prevent staff from accessing such material?

At eRisk consulting ltd we thought about this issue at length.  In our opinion two factors have to be considered:

• Technology: URL or key word blocking technology, although appropriate, only restricts access to known avenues and sources. However, there are “many many ways to skin a cat”.   As these public cases illustrate, staff can find ways aroud these blockers, by browsing on the work laptop at home, using wireless networks or bringing images in on USB tokens.
   
• People: Technology cannot control people.  Where there is a will, people find a way around technology barriers.  If a staff member is caught breaching your appropriate usage policy, you must be able to counter arguments like “It was a pop-up”, “I never saw the images” or “I only did it once”.

When we searched for a tool set that could assist organisations to manage both people and technology, we found PixAlert.

The PixAlert^® Enterprise Suite offers innovative new technology to manage the problem of inappropriate images in the workplace and to help reduce the risks to companies and individuals.  It does this through image analysis, not of files and media, but of the image that is viewed by the user.  It offers multi-source image detection, capture and analysis to catch those who find ways to work around the rules.  Images of concern are recorded and an alert is sent to an administrator for assessment and follow up.

For more information on PixAlert take a look at their web site www.pixalert.com

PixAlert ImageGuard Mail Appliance

Real time detection of inappropriate images on corporate email servers

ImageGuard MailAppliance™ is a hardware appliance, which will audit inbound, outbound and internal emails for inappropriate images. ImageGuard MailAppliance connects to the email gateway and will scan inbound and outbound email attachments in real time.

ImageGuard MailAppliance also connects directly to email servers and will scan them for images of a pornographic nature held either inline or as attachments in over 150 file types.

PixAlert Critical Data Auditor

PixAlert have just released a new auditing tool for helping organisations check for compliance with Payment Card Industry standards. Privacy Auditor will audit you environment for credit card details in the same way we can check for inappropriate images.

Check the Pixalert Critical Data Auditor website for more details (here) for more details.