Archive for April, 2010
SEC Employees Surfing Porn Sites At Work
News has traveled quickly after hearing that some SEC employees were viewing porn sites during the 2008 financial crises instead of focusing on their job duties.
Employees have admitted to viewing porn at work for over a year and viewing porn on SEC-issues laptops while outside of the office. One of the staff accountants was extremely persistent and tried 16,000 times in one month to access porn sites and filled his work hard drive with inappropriate images. And, a senior attorney admitted to sometimes spending eight hours per day searching for porn. (See the article by MarketWatch)
Here’s a dose of reality. The people in the news lately could have very easily been you or me. It’s easy to say “I’d never do that”, but, the truth of the matter is that you never know what might happen. With all the inappropriate sites out there today, it is so easy to accidentally stumble upon one by mistake. Maybe you type in the URL wrong, or innocently click a link in your search engine and it bring up a bad site. Then, that image stays in your mind and you keep thinking about it until your curiosity gets to you so you tinker a little bit. Then, before you know it, you’ve fallen into that slippery slope.
We are all tempted in different areas of life. And, because we are human, we are not perfect. Therefore, we need to place hedges around us to help us fight off those temptations. I’d like to challenge you to get an accountability party that you can talk to on a regular basis to help you through whatever struggles you are facing. Secondly, I’d like to challenge you to be proactive in placing a hedge of protection around your virtual world by installing a trusted Internet filter. Just as you wouldn’t live in a home with no locks on the doors to protect yourself from physical harm, don’t let you and your family live unprotected from inappropriate sites on the Internet that could harm you or your family’s mind.
Is someone viewing porn on your Internet connection?
I came across a news article today in which an 18 year old broke into a church to view pornography on the church computer. What’s even worse is that people can view pornography on your computer network even without physically breaking into your home and/or business and you never know it.
To help protect your home and/or business network against strangers from surfing pornography on your Internet connection from a laptop in their car or physically on one of your computers:
1. Make sure your wireless router’s security settings are enabled. Many people purchase a wireless router for their home and/or business and plug it up without changing any of the default settings. By doing this, you are allowing anyone outside your home, within range, to use YOUR Internet connection any way they want, including surfing porn sites. If they were to access anything illegal, it would come back to you and your network and you would have to prove otherwise. Take the time to go through your wireless router’s manual to set up WPA2 security on it. I personally advise to also set it to not broadcast your wireless network’s name.
2. Install an Internet Filter to block porn sites. In addition to securing your wireless router, add an additional internal layer of protection with an Internet filter, like Bsecure. An Internet filter like Bsecure can provide up to 58 categories that you can allow or block. It also provides graphical reporting of the types of sites that are being visited as well as sending you instant alerts of suspicious activity. This way, if someone were to physically breach your house or business to surf porn, they couldn’t. It will also protect yourself from guests or friends of your children who may be “curious” and try to go to sites they should not visit.