News

News Archive- 17 April 2007

PixAlert looks to grow channel to address growing problem of pornography and illegal images in the workplace.

Audit figures point to high level of inappropriate and illegal images on corporate and pubic sector networks.

17 April 2007: PixAlert is on a mission to appoint new channel partners in the UK and Ireland to address the increasing concern about the level of pornographic and illegal images in the workplace.

Audits on over 125 corporate and public sector networks by PixAlert 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.

And 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% 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 third of all images found created in the last 12 months it is clear that employees continue to ignore corporate policies and in some cases are going to extraordinary lengths to bypass protection systems to obtain and distribute inappropriate material. Boundary protection systems alone will not stop digital pornography from entering an organisation.

“The only effective way to detect, manage and eliminate inappropriate images is by using powerful network audit or real-time monitoring solutions such as PixAlert Auditor and PixAlert Monitor,” says Kieran Caulfield, sales director at PixAlert. “With increasing demand, we now need new channel partners that can deliver our products and image audit services. These may range from traditional security resellers and managed service providers to companies offering audit, forensic and risk assessment services,” says Caulfield.

PixAlert offers an ideal way to add value to existing products and services with recurring revenue streams and a strong licensing program and partner support and reward structure. Using a high-speed image analysis engine, the new PixAlert 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.

PixAlert offers a 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, PixAlert provides a report that assesses the overall risk and severity of inappropriate images based on the material found in the audit.

“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 Caulfield. “In most cases when companies see the results of an audit they will work with a PixAlert partner to audit their complete networks.”