Netsweeper helps your computer be malicious-free

If you have tried logging in to the blocked websites at work or in your college computer lab, you must have come across Netsweeper more than just once. Founded in 1999, Netsweeper provides web content filtering, using a dynamic categorisation engine that is updated continuously. It is meant for preventing inappropriate, illegal or malicious content from entering computers and networks. “Netsweeper software also helps monitor, log and generate reports on when and what category of websites are being accessed from the net,” says Gajapathy Chakaravarthy, General Manager, Operations, Netsweeper. When an organisation or educational institution wants to make use of Netsweeper’s services, they define the content filtering policies. However,  Netsweeper has no role to play in this determination process. “For educational organisation, this means blocking content that is inappropriate for school going children by using publicly funded devices,” says Gajapathy. “This inappropriate content includes pornography, gambling, drug or alcohol abuse, hate speech, profanity, phishing and the like,” he explains. Online games and social networking websites are other sites that the company has helped screen out. In state or country-wide deployments, the government decides what is appropriate or inappropriate and regulates the internet policy using Netsweeper’s central web-based administration system, says Gajapathy. When the school or the government authorities decide to block pornography and downloading piracy content for all students, then Netsweeper’s software supports to enforce this policy centrally. For example, if the government decides to enforce or regulate an internet policy on free laptops given to students, it would protect unforeseen online threats and keep the parents, teachers and institutions safe with the knowledge that students are focussed on e-learning.Also, Netsweeper logs and reports all internet activities based on each user at a central server, which validates the usage of internet — when and what they have accessed — among the students, teachers or staff. Hence, the government or school authorities can monitor the internet activities of every user and enforce the internet usage policy accordingly.The primary method attempted by students to bypass mandatory filtering by Netsweeper is through the use of web-based proxies. However, Netsweeper’s dynamic categorisation is highly effective in countering this approach, especially when compared to web filtering that relies on static lists or databases of sites. “Whenever a new proxy site is accessed for the first time by a Netsweeper’s user, the site address is sent to cloud-based AI engines for analysis and categorisation. The results of this analysis are then published and made available to all our customers,” says Gajapathy. “Then, we rapidly and effectively categorise these sites. Thereby, it mitigates the risk these sites pose to our customers. We add over 40,000 sites a day to our Master Category Name Server.”