While organisations grapple with a range of threats daily – from compliance and legislation to IT security and operation challenges – many of them ignore the problem of child sexual abuse, despite the fact that it is rapidly becoming a real issue within the corporate world.
“Preventing the spread of child sexual abuse content is something that all businesses should care about,” says Francois Els, GM of African NetClean distributor African Risk Mitigation (ARM). “Every day we hear about
more arrests being made worldwide with regards to child sexual abuse, and many of these individuals have been using their company networks to access the illegal images and videos.”
Recently, US police arrested the general manager of the Entergy Technology Company on a charge of possessing pornography involving juveniles, after Entergy discovered that he was downloading child sexual abuse
images on his office computer and notified police. The arrest report stated: “the computer was receiving and transmitting mass downloads from child pornography web sites”.
With these types of arrests – locally and internationally – hitting the headlines and further allegations being added every week, people are starting to understand the scale and scope of the problem of child sexual
abuse, says Els. “However there is still an assumption that this behaviour happens elsewhere, by employees at other companies.”
According to Christian Berg, CEO of NetClean, the most common reaction of businesses to the presence of child sexual abuse material in the workplace is one of disbelief. “Do people really do that at work?” they ask,
“surely not” they say. “But in our experience, the work place is just as exposed to this crime as all other aspects of life. Societal issues are not checked at the front door of the business. Despite the image of
professionalism, any community – whether a business, a club, a town or a country – is exposed to this problem.”
Els explains that, because of the nature of this issue, it does not fall on the radar of the technology “to-do list” of many companies, who focus on more well-known business and security threats. However, he points out
that law enforcement agencies around the world have seen a huge volume of cases involving content found on corporate devices and even inadvertently backed up to corporate servers.
“Brand damage, lawsuit costs, and loss of business during investigation, negative press, staff counselling: the costs of not having effective processes and tools in place to track and prevent this crime are high. There
is even the risk of the sites that this kind of content is accessed from identifying and attacking the IP address of the user, an IP address that may belong to the organisation,” says Els.
“It should be a fundamental element to any risk mitigation and security strategy.
“Every day we hear about more arrests being made worldwide with regards to child sexual abuse, and many of these individuals have been using their company networks to access the illegal images and videos.”