NetClean on a mission to kick paedophiles off the web

News this week that a convicted paedophile used a public library computer to download illegal images onto a USB, and a separate story about a head teacher caught with similar images on his school-issued laptop, has highlighted the limited technology available to prevent illegal behaviour inside public and private sector networks.

V3.co.uk sat down with Anna Goss, UK country manager at Swedish firm NetClean, which has been on an eight-year mission to make life a lot easier for IT managers, ISPs and the police by giving them the tools to proactively identify and alert when network users view illegal images.

NetClean's ProActive product sits on the user's endpoint like an anti-virus client, and is based on a blacklist system designed to check against a list of illegal content classified and continuously updated by the police.

As such, it manages to bypass the problem of false positives which some products that scan for a percentage of flesh tone sometimes return, she said.

It then blocks the images or videos and alerts two designated admins via text or email - usually an IT manager and an HR manager.

"We want to get the solution on as many laptops and desktops as possible because if we don't these people will go on to abuse a child," Goss said. "It should be the CEOs down in organisations saying: 'We won't put up with this.'"

Goss bemoaned the head-in-the-sand approach she sees so often from many organisations not willing to consider that some of their staff may be engaged in such behaviour, and appealed to firms' corporate social responsibility to put the product in place.

20 May 2011

It's true that organisations have often shied away from confronting the possibility that paedophiles are viewing illegal content on their networks, as many are concerned that alerting the police may put themselves be at risk of prosecution.

The work of the Internet Watch Foundation in this area has been pioneering and is commonly held up as a example of global best practice on how law enforcement and industry can work together to eradicate these images from the internet and catch those responsible.

However, technical solutions up until now have been patchy at best and prone to false positives, so NetClean appears to offer a genuine alternative. Being a blacklist-based system, it won't catch everything, but offers a better opportunity than most to kick this kind of behaviour off the network.

It will be interesting to see whether NetClean manages to overcome the post-recessionary reluctance to spend any part of the valuable IT budget on a non-mission critical tool, however.

The vendor is also working with law enforcement to provide its Analyze suite designed to speed up and improve the accuracy of investigations, and is having conversations with UK ISPs about building the blocking technology into their services.

ISPs have already sought to differentiate their services in the past with anti-spam and security filters, so it wouldn't be a massive leap to incorporate additional filters for this type of illegal content.