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IWF membership confirms Fortinet customers' protection against known child sexual abuse URLs in line with government expectations
June 18th, 2007
- Fortinet® - a pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions,
today announced its membership of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), joining over 70 organisations working to combat potentially illegal online content and prevent access to child sexual abuse URLs on the IWF list. By aligning its award-winning URL filtering technology with the IWF blacklist, Fortinet customers are even better protected from exposure to potentially illegal online content hosted overseas.
"The IWF has achieved significant success in combating the presence and distribution of the worst kind of illegal content online, and ensuring that Internet users in the UK are protected," said Phil Keeling, Regional Director, UK, Ireland and South Africa at Fortinet. "This partnership will ultimately further these objectives, and add extra benefits for users that choose Fortinet solutions."
The IWF works with UK government departments such as the Home Office and the Department of Trade and Industry and has compiled an extensive URL list as a result of the reports it processes, which enables the filtering of potentially illegal child sexual abuse web sites. In particular, the partnership holds great significance for Fortinet's growing customer base in the education sector. Keeling explains;
"With millions of dangerous sites available to students every day, blocking potentially illegal content with the right security solution is critical to education establishments. As a member of the IWF, we are also aligning with BECTA (British Educational Communications Technology Agency) requirements, so we can be confident that the vast number of students protected by Fortinet security devices continue to be shielded to the maximum."
The IWF provides the UK's only authorised Internet Hotline, allowing the public to report their inadvertent exposure to potentially illegal online content, and operates a ‘notice and take-down' service for companies hosting potentially illegal content. As a result of these arrangements, less than 1% of potentially illegal child abuse content has been hosted in the UK since 2003, down from 18% in 1997.
Peter Robbins, CEO, IWF, said "The IWF relies on the support of its members and works hard to service its diverse membership base of nearly 80 companies and organisations. The success and influence of the IWF relies on our self-regulatory approach in partnership with industry without which we would not have made such significant progress combating online child sexual abuse content. We are very pleased to welcome Fortinet as an associate member and look forward to working with them in the future."
About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com)
Fortinet is the pioneer and market-leading provider of ASIC-accelerated unified threat management systems, which are used by enterprises and service providers to increase their security while reducing total operating costs. Fortinet solutions were built from the ground up to integrate multiple levels of security protection--including firewall, antivirus, intrusion prevention, Web content filtering, VPN, spyware prevention and antispam--providing customers a way to protect multiple threats as well as blended threats. Leveraging a custom ASIC and unified interface, Fortinet solutions offer advanced security functionality that scales from remote office to chassis-based solutions with integrated management and reporting. Fortinet solutions have won multiple awards around the world and are the only security products that are certified eight times over by the ICSA (firewall, antivirus, IPSec, SSL, IDS, client antivirus detection, cleaning and antispyware). Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California.
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