Business Edition: Importance of Internet Security and Governance for Organizations and Businesses

Inside The Sweeps- Business Edition

Mike Chambers stops by to discuss the importance of businesses and organizations implementing web filtering to protect themselves and their employees online.

        Host: Umair Ahmed (Product Marketing Specialist)
             Email: (umair.ahmed@netsweeper.com)

             Guest: Mike Chambers (Business Category Manager)
           Email: (mike.chambers@netsweeper.com)


                    Website: (https://www.netsweeper.com/business/)


 
     Music:  (www.bensound.com)

Transcript

[00:07:35] Netsweeper itself in business does three main things. One of the key aspects is cyber security, one of them internet corporate governance, and the third thing is productivity.

From the productivity side (and this relates to many of the others as well) contained within Netsweeper are a number of different internet categories. We can allow organizations to control that and monitor that by switching on and off individual categories or individual subcategories within them.

[00:12:13] The key here is to address phishing attacks and the majority of those are, of course, internet related. You get an email through the looks right from a new CEO or something, asking you to click on this or send some funds somewhere or simply click through to a site. Then malware is downloaded to your computer and all sorts of terrible things happen. Most organizations, I certainly hope all organizations, will have all sorts of firewalls, mail scanning tools, endpoint security. They’ll also have user training about what a phishing email looks like. You know, penetration testing regularly and this kind of thing.

We as cyber firms have to do our best to be successful 100% of the time. Whereas if you’re a hacker, it simply takes one email and one person to click on that email and all of a sudden, you know, your company’s got issues.

So within our categories, we have a malware and a phishing category. In the event that an email comes through that has a link to malware or a potential phishing site, and in the event that an employee doesn’t realize that this doesn’t look right or thinks “hey, if its got through all our defenses is so far, it must be okay to click on this” if they then click on it, we make it impossible for them to access the site or the part of the internet that the hacker intends them to get to.

So we block that within our malware and our phishing categories and the main difference is if you certainly look at netsweeper.com/livestats, you can see on there that we scan the internet using our AI technology on a regular basis all of the time, 24 hours a day, and not only do we prevent viruses, malware, and phishing attacks but within milliseconds we categorize new URLs on the internet.

[0:22] As an IT company, along with every other IT company, we simply provide tools to enable organizations to get the best out of their employees and if getting the best out of their employees is to provide cyber security, limit distractions and all sorts of things, then then, yeah, you know, that’s our role and that’s where we fit into the marketplace.

[00:25] So I’ve talked about our categorization. But if you don’t want people accessing certain parts of the internet, certain applications, certain streaming videos, or placing bets, we can very much ensure that that sort of thing doesn’t happen. Not only do we stop people betting or watching streaming media or being unproductive, not only do we stop people accessing malware sites and this sort of thing, but there’s also an entire plethora of additional categories related to topics which are a little bit more serious, of course, like porn, radicalization, suicide or this sort of thing.

[00:26] I think employers have a duty of care to their employees to make sure that, you know, they haven’t got access to that sort of thing. They can’t control people’s personal lives, but they can certainly limit what they do on work or company owned equipment.

Secondly, from a duty of care perspective and from a legal perspective, I think the attitudes towards the internet have changed over the past 12 to 18 months or so. Organizations need to ensure that every possible aspect of the dark parts of the internet are covered and that they’re looking after their employees from that side. Internet use policy or internet governance shouldn’t just be ticked boxes. No, some of this is really serious dark stuff, that isn’t very nice for an employee either. If companies can do their part to look after their staff and steer them away from that kind of thing, then yeah, absolutely. It’s something they should be doing and it’s something that we can very much help them do as well.

[00:28] One thing I would talk about is we have a free productivity assessment, which is effectively a trial which lasts for seven days. We don’t block anything and don’t prevent anything happening.

All we need an organization’s public IP address. We put that into our tool and we view what people have been accessing over the seven days. Then we can report back to whoever it might be in the organization that we’re dealing with. This is the number of employees that have been shopping and how much time they spent doing it. This is the number who have been looking at job sites and this kind of thing. We can show them the productivity that they can get from their employees, along with the amount of malware and phishing threats that they’ve experienced without even knowing it through that free productivity assessment.