The long summer holidays are over here in the UK, and our kids have pretty much all gone back to school this week. Which is good news for providers of anonymous proxies and bad news for the school network admins trying to prevent students from accessing inappropriate sites.
One UK web content filtering specialist, Bloxx, is warning that educational institutions should be aware that every year kids are becoming increasingly savvy with regards to bypassing filtering systems. As that knowledge of technology, and in particular the Internet, continues to evolve so the threat to school filtering evolves alongside.
Bloxx warns that students are finding new subversive ways in which to access non-work related sites during school hours. Of course, the easiest and therefore also the most popular method continues to by connecting to an anonymous proxy server to access those sites which may otherwise have been blocked.
"Teachers notice when students are spending too much time gossiping in the classroom, whereas quietly surfing the Internet is not quite so obvious, yet it has the potential to expose children to inappropriate and even harmful material if not properly regulated," warns Bloxx Managing Director, Eamonn Doyle. "Students are incredibly tech-savvy and each year they becoming more knowledgeable about how to successfully evade web filters by using anonymous proxies. Hundreds of anonymous proxy sites are created every week and blocking them using traditional web filters, which rely on URL black lists, is simply no longer effective" he continues, concluding "Schools must be aware of how to manage and regulate Internet access by deploying the right technology in order to avoid children coming across inappropriate online content, whether accidentally or otherwise."
