Aladdin Knowledge Systems, a vendor specialising in authentication, software DRM and content security, has strengthened the IT security at Piggott School by preventing the use of anonymous proxies.

Piggott School is a Church of England Aided 11-18 co-educational comprehensive in Wargrave, near Reading in Berkshire. It specialises in languages and humanities and has just over 1,000 students.

James Fisher, IT manager for The Piggott School, said that the old content security system was not able to cope with more modern threats such as anonymous proxies.

“We treat the security of our ICT very seriously as we use it extensively across almost every department. We have traditionally scanned for viruses and blocked access to non academic websites but the use of anonymous proxies is a relatively new area which our old security platform was not equipped to deal with,” he said.

The school was concerned about improper content appearing on its network, so called in Aladdin Knowledge Systems partner HANDD Business Solution, a provider ICT security, auditing and compliance platforms.

Their investigations discovered that 2,500 malicious or illicit websites had been accessed during the week-long monitoring period.

Using an Aladdin Web Threat Analyser, HANDD also found 22 viruses on the network, meaning either someone was downloading them or there was an infected machine on their network trying to download them. In addition to this, almost 6,000 Spyware and Security exploits were spotted, the company said.

All this pointed to the fact that Piggott School’s security system was not doing its job properly. The school decided to implement an Aladdin eSafe Gateway appliance with URL and Application content filtering as a replacement.

The platform includes the eSafe anonymiser system, said to block 100% of tools that circumvent Web security, including anonymous proxies.

“We went for an appliance because it is much simpler to manage and integrate into our existing infrastructure and can scale if we need to add more PCs to our network,” said Fisher.

Another monitoring programme carried out on the network after installation found no instances of anonymous proxies, viruses or malware.