A recent audit undertaken by an Irish company in a high school uncovered inappropriate images on every PC scanned, which is nearly 5 times the average figure found in corporations and the number of illicit images found per Megabyte was nearly 10 times the corporate average. Some put this down to the fact that corporations implement more advanced preventative technology, but this is simply not the case. The truth is that students are more inquisitive and adept at finding routes around gateway prevention systems.

There are a myriad of ways that illegal or inappropriate images can get on to the desktop and the school network other than via the Internet. Typically, a computer will have conventional points of entry such as CD/DVD, Ethernet card, serial and parallel ports; modern connectivity protocols such as USB have opened computers up to multiple new hardware devices with very high data transfer rates. The ability to plug and play using USB has meant an extremely rapid introduction of storage devices such as portable hard drives, PDAs and memory sticks that are very hard for schools to monitor and control.

Unmonitored web activity on computers and PDAs at home is now widespread. This is a situation that will only get worse with the rise in easy instant connectivity to WiFi hotspots and broadband at home. In addition peer to peer communications, encryption of transmitted data and secure internet connections will all bypass or compromise any school's gateway filtering solutions.

The majority of schools that want to protect themselves from the effects of illegal and inappropriate images rely solely on image protection at the internet gateway that works by blocking traffic from a banned list of sites. But the mere fact that 20,000 new pornographic web pages are launched per day means that it is impossible to keep an up to date list of harmful sites. Such systems also do nothing to counteract increased threats from new technologies such as PDAs, memory sticks, DVDs CDs, digital cameras and camera phones.

UK Legislation

Worryingly, many head teachers are unaware that they and their Local Education Authority could be held criminally and civilly liable if illegal images are found on school computers. Put simply, there can be huge legal, financial and reputational implications for schools, local education authorities and head teachers if they do not take appropriate measures to ensure illegal and inappropriate images are not stored on school computer systems. To exacerbate things, UK law is changing to make it illegal to possess extreme pornography, in addition to child pornography, containing explicit actual scenes or realistic depictions of necrophilia, violent pornography and bestiality. In many other jurisdictions, such images are not illegal (unlike child pornography) and can be found easily on many websites creating an additional threat to schools.

No nudes is good nudes

The shear quantity of images found in the recent schools audit emphasizes the fact that gateway security technology alone is not sufficient to prevent inappropriate and illegal images in the workplace. What is needed is some additional form of desktop image detection software. The Monitor, for example, is capable of monitoring, intercepting and even obscuring any illicit content that is being displayed on a computer screen. Regardless of how it got there, the underlying application used to view it, file format or encryption protocol, if a pupil attempts to view illicit image content on the screen and it contains illegal or inappropriate images it will be blocked, blurred or simply captured and an alert generated.

The Auditor on the other hand is a fully featured image scanning and image incident management tool designed to detect and handle illicit images on IT resources such as desktop computers, network servers, email accounts, notebook PCs and PDAs. The software carries out a full audit scan of image material stored on IT assets and ranks them on the basis of their inappropriateness. Suspect images, which transgress a pre-defined threshold, are automatically presented to the designated administrator in a user-friendly gallery.

The scan provides a full report on its findings and the administrator can add any inappropriate images found to a case file. If configured to do so, the auditor can also remove inappropriate images stored on suspect computers. It is only through a combination of web filtering and live monitoring of what images are actually being displayed on the desktop that an organization can truly stop these activities in the workplace and be protected against the legal and financial consequences of illegal content.