A comparison of Vericept with web filters
Vericept is a network monitoring tool that gives administration officials the visibility to manage the daily risks and threats that accompany internet use by students and staff.
Vericept is a network monitoring tool that gives administration officials the visibility to manage the daily risks and threats that accompany internet use by students and staff.
Vericept is not designed to replace your current webfilter.
Webfilters such as Websense, iPrism, 8e6 Technologies, Surfcontrol or SmartFilter are your districts first line of defense against inappropriate material. But are they enough? Webfilters only block based on URL databases that they develop and control. URL filters will always block good websites and miss bad ones – by design. URL filters also ignore large amounts of traffic that you need to see in order to effectively enforce your acceptable use policy.
How is Vericept different?
Vericept does not block websites. Vericept monitors lingusitic content and has the ability to understand the context of language being used. If Vericept finds material that has a high probability of violating your district AUP then Vericept “logs” the “violation” and classifies it into the appropriate category. The event is stored in a database with the complete content of the communication, including webpages, IM, and email along with all identifying information available such as source/destination IP, LDAP username, email address and/or IM handle. Vericept is a COMPLIMENTARY monitoring tool to augment your current webfilter.
Your web filter is probably not seeing:
- Anonymous cyber-bullying and online harassment
- Users bypassing the filter using web proxies
- Students being groomed via IM sessions
- Students coordinating violent acts and gang activity
- Students purchasing “pre-written” term papers
- Loss of PII or FERPA/HIPAA violations
- Hacker Research
- While your webfilter is only protecting against port 80 URL violations, Vericept monitors all forms of TCP/IP traffic including:
- Web: All webcontent that “slips” past your webfilter, Vericept Analyzes and Classifies
- IM: MSN, Yahoo IM, AIM
- Webmail: Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL etc
- FTP
- p2p: Kazaa, eDonkey, etc.
- Attachments: Word, Excel, PDF, etc.
- Anonymous Proxies: Vericept will show the proxies they are using to bypass your webfilter so you can block them. (You might also be interested in Webwasher to solve this.)
Not only will Vericept monitor all forms of TCP/IP traffic but Vericept will also classify the information you are most interested in:
- Social Security Numbers that may be carelessly emailed by staff members
- Credit Card Numbers that may be carelessly emailed by staff members
- Mailing lists that may be sent to marketing firms
- Web, IM, and Blog information that your users may be involved in to coordinate illegal activities
The list of possible activities goes on and on.
Vericept Education Categories
Vericept’s education solution comes with pre-defined categories ideal for the K12 environment. These can also be used as starting points for your own custom categories.
- Adult
- Anonymous Proxy Research
- Conflict
- Credit Card Number
- FERPA
- Gambling
- Games
- Gangs
- P2P Research
- Plagiarism
- Racism
- Shopping
- Social Security Number
- Sports
- Streaming Media
- Substance Abuse
- Trading
- Violent Acts
- Weapons
- IM&Chat
- Mailing Lists
- P2P Sharing
- Web and Blog Postings
- Web Mail-Send
- Web Mail-Receive
