Internet Watch Foundation

Fortinet, a provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions, has 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 list of URLs, Fortinet customers are better protected from exposure to potentially illegal online content hosted overseas.

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."

 

Phil Keeling, Regional Director, UK, Ireland and South Africa at Fortinet, said: "This partnership will add extra benefits for users that choose Fortinet solutions. Blocking potentially illegal content with the right security solution is critical to education establishments. As a member of the IWF, we are 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 works with UK government departments such as the Home Office and the Department of Trade and Industry and is 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.

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Fortinet is the pioneer and leading provider of ASIC-accelerated multi-threat security 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, VPN, spyware prevention and antispam--providing customers a way to help protect against 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 Labs (firewall, antivirus, IPSec, SSL, IPS, client antivirus detection, cleaning and antispyware). Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California .

 

David Evans/Jennifer Manning, Cohesive Communications, +44 (0) 1291 626200, fortinet@cohesive.uk.com

Barbara Maigret, Fortinet Inc, +33 (0)4 8987 0552, bmaigret@fortinet.com

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) was formed in 1996 following an agreement between the Government, police and the internet service provider industry that a partnership approach was needed to tackle the distribution of child abuse images online.

 

Essentially the IWF is an independent body operating the only authorised non police 'Hotline' in the UK for the public and IT professionals to report their inadvertent exposure to illegal content on the internet. The IWF also provides a universal ‘notice and take-down’ service to any content service provider in the UK so they can remove potentially illegal content from their servers. We work closely with law enforcement agencies at home and abroad to help them trace the publishers of such content.

 

As a result of these arrangements less than 1% of potentially illegal child abuse content is apparently hosted in the UK, down from 18% in 1997.

   

Please note that the terms "child pornography" or "child porn" can act to legitimise images, which are not pornography. Rather, they are permanent records of children being sexually abused and as such should be referred to as child abuse images.

IWF Communications, 01223 237700, media@iwf.org.uk