Fighting Child Abuse And Spyware

Every person or organization that spends time surfing the Web faces the risk of spyware and viruses. For those who spend time investigating sites that specialize in child pornography and other illicit material, the risk is even greater. That's why software to protect their machines is crucial.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on Wednesday began migrating its systems to Active Directory. That deployment had been on hold because of the large quantities of spyware, pop-ups, and other malicious software the center's workers ran into as they investigated potentially illicit Web sites, according to Steve Gelfound, director of IT at the center.

The flood of pop-up ads and spyware would drill in and corrupt user registries. Gelfound's five-person help desk spent all its time rebuilding user systems at a pace of 15 per day. For a few months, they used tools off the Web that cleaned a machine. But an hour later the computers were infected again. "Our disk drives looked like they were in a gum-ball machine, with all the moving in and out," Gelfound says. "We were talking about isolating that group on their own network."

The center recently installed eTrust PestPatrol Anti-Spyware software from Computer Associates. "The next day our [help desk] call volume was zero," Gelfound says. "PestPatrol works proactively and is catching around 300 instances per day per machine."

By gaining control of the spyware problem, Gelfound says he was able to begin the migration to Active Directory, a directory service designed for distributed computing environments that serves as a central authority for network security, without worrying that malicious software would corrupt the center's computers.