Controlling Internet Access

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The great majority of companies encounter a loss of productivity and a useless waste of business time caused by employees visiting Internet servers that are unnecessary to their jobs. The statistical information on this topic is rather interesting:

• 32.6% of users have no particular goal when surfing the Web.

• 28% of all users go Internet shopping during business hours.

• The amount of pornographic traffic transmitted during business hours makes up 70% of all such traffic on the Internet.

In order to detect and identify such cases of abuse, one can use content-control tools or firewalls. However, quite often there are no funds to purchase these tools. Because of this, part of the functions for controlling access to Internet resources that are implemented by these tools can be delegated to intrusion detection systems. In these cases, IDS will control network traffic using a set of predefined keywords or requests to specific web servers.

Vatican Site Hacked 

An hour after the Pope's declaration in which he reminded Catholics around the world about the dangers of using contemporary technologies, particularly electronic mass media, was published, unknown hackers defaced the Vatican site. Reuters reported this case on January 29, 2001. The Pope's declaration was timed to coincide with World Communications Day. The Pope was appealing to all Catholics of the necessity of using current mass media to propagate religious ideas, and paid special attention to the Internet and electronic mass media. In particular, he mentioned the danger of the all-embracing availability of information, which might produce such results as doubts in true belief. The unknown hackers did not hesitate to confirm this. According to the information provided by II Messaggero, a Brazilian hack group is suspected in this defacement. However, the damage inflicted by the hackers was insignificant, and soon the resource was returned to its normal state.

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