18 April 2007: Audits on over 125 corporate and public sector networks by an Irish company over the last nine months found that 25.8% of the 10,000 PCs scanned contained digital pornography or other inappropriate images.

The sample audits also found that 12.4% of the 12,000 email accounts and 5.4% of 26,000 file server shares scanned were similarly affected. With regards to the images themselves, 46.8% were found to show full nudity or sexual activity while 0.3% were determined to be illegal. While 35.0% were internet images, a worrying 45.2% of images detected were sourced from emails; and of these 19.7% were outbound and 35.5% sent internally.

“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,” says Andy Churley, marketing director at the Irish company.

“Corporate officers wrongly assume that boundary protection systems stop all digital pornography from entering the organisation but, in the Irish company's experience, almost all corporations will have a significant amount of pornography on their networks.”

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. Using a high-speed image analysis engine, the new Auditor 3.4 rapidly identifies digital pornography in over 150 different file types on all corporate IT resources such as PCs, file servers and email servers.

“While all organisations 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,” says Churley.

“Companies are particularly concerned when they have visibility of the number of pornographic images being distributed by email internally or sent out to other organisations using a corporate email address.”

The Irish company offers a complimentary Discovery Audit to companies covering a subset of desktops, servers and email files, to assess the level of illicit image content on the network. Along with this, it provides a report that assesses the overall risk and severity of inappropriate images based on the material found in the audit.

“We are delighted that Microsoft is taking a strong lead in providing a safer family computing environment,” said John Nolan, CEO. “This initiative dramatically improves family protection by implementing better security measures at the operating system level. SafeScreen works with Windows Vista to prevent families viewing unwanted images that are increasingly finding their way onto home PCs from multiple sources, including Internet, DVDs and cell phones.”

SafeScreen enhances website blocking technologies already built into Windows vista by intercepting and blurring inappropriate images at the screen in real time.

"Parents want solutions to better protect their families on and offline and this requires a broad industry-wide approach," said David George, Director, Family Safe Computing at Microsoft. "We are excited about the breadth of support Windows Vista is receiving from our security partners that provide parental controls and safety solutions. Microsoft will continue to push on all fronts towards its long-term goal of providing a safer and more secure environment for its customers and will continue to build on already strong efforts with industry partners."