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Computerworld - It's funny how during the course of dealing with one incident, one often discovers other issues that also need to be addressed.

A few weeks ago, my company was dealing with a Nimda virus infestation. During the course of looking for the suspect traffic, we noticed other Web traffic leaving the corporate network. After filtering the traffic with the Snort intrusion-detection tool and the TCPDump network sniffer utility, we discovered that a significant amount of HTTP traffic was destined for sites that are, let's say, not business-related. Some employees appeared to be spending three to four hours a day surfing these Web sites.

It's one thing if employees occasionally surf to news sites such as CNN.com. But when a significant amount of network bandwidth is wasted by employees surfing to porn sites, I'm bothered. First, it's not a productive use of company time. Second, if an employee sees a co-worker surfing to such questionable Web sites, that employee can sue the company for sexual harassment. Finally, law enforcement agencies have set up sting operations in which they run and monitor illegal pornography sites.

If an employee surfs to one of these sites and gets nabbed by a law enforcement agency, the incident could eventually generate negative press against our company. In addition, we would have to answer to subpoenas and search warrants. I've been through that mess before, and frankly, it's a waste of my time to be put into interrupt mode and require me to chase logs, image hard drives and answer to a bunch of guys in suits and ties who end up making me feel like the guilty party.

PROXYTOOLS Here’s how to find out more about the proxy servers my company is considering, along with other useful resources I found in my search. Websense offers a 30-day trial version of Websense Enterprise at its Web site. Microsoft’s Internet Security and Acceleration Server Web page includes a demo and downloadable trial software. Sun offers both a product specification page for its iPlanet Web Proxy Server and an evaluation guide white paper at this Web site. As an open-source alternative, Squid is one of the best free Web proxy server software programs available. This Web site provides links to reviews and product information for about 30 proxy servers.

I created an acceptable-use policy for our company a few months ago, but the human resources department hasn't put the wheels in motion yet to ensure that all employees have acknowledged it. To address the acknowledgment