Lora Bentley spoke with Jim Schriver, a spokesperson for Black Box Network Services, regarding the recent media attention garnered when the National Science Foundation discovered several of its employees had been viewing inappropriate Web sites during work hours. Schriver points out that simple URL and keyword content filtering won't cut it anymore.

Bentley: I've read and written lately about what happened at the National Science Foundation, and I was really surprised there didn't seem to be much content filtering going on there. Can you speak to that situation at all?

Schriver: It’s a little surprising that an organization of that size, in 2009, would not have at least very basic filters in place. Now, I don’t know, and I haven’t talked to anyone there to find out if there were filters in place and people were  just able to bypass them, or if they were simply wide open. It is possible that they did have one in place, and in fact, for the sake of the person running that IT organization, I hope they did have something in place and that people were just able to find ways to get around it.

Bentley: There is technology that can prevent inappropriate Web surfing, right?
Schriver: Content filtering has been around for quite some time. It’s not new, and it’s not rocket science.  Black Box doesn't do simple, inexpensive content filtering, but we have implemented simple content filtering and more advanced content filtering into an appliance that does some other things as well.

Bentley: What drove the decision to offer that appliance?

Schriver: We’ve had school districts, health care institutions and a lot of organizations that have found the younger generations (say ages 10-25, since we’re talking about schools) is amazing in its ability to find hacks and ends-around for virtually any piece of IT equipment.You can go into a school district, which is required by law to filter out inappropriate content and has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on very nice equipment from very big companies, and you can get an eighth-grader with a very simple piece of software who can circumvent that half-million dollar system in five minutes.

Bentley: How do they do that?

Schriver: The big thing now in the schools is to use anonymous proxies. You can go to a site that will go out and reach otherwise filtered content for you and serve it up on one of their URLs. Or, if you use an https URL, if you use an SSL connection, most content filters can’t look at encrypted data. So if you reach out and get otherwise prohibited content using an encrypted link, it goes right by the filters.

Bentley: So what works? If basic content filtering isn't enough, what is?
Schriver: Our take on it is if you’re going to do content filtering right, you’ve got to do it with different backup methods. Black Box technology does deep packet inspection and will look at encrypted traffic as well as http traffic to filter out unwanted content along with the typical keyword and URL filters.