New Web-Filtering Technology Helps Schools Curb Teen Drug Use

SAN DIEGO, June 22 /PRNewswire/ -- While annual surveys conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse have shown steady declines in teen drug use over the past five years, the Internet continues to pose a danger by providing young people easy access to information on how to obtain and use drugs. For instance, a pamphlet issued by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America alerts parents to a number of Web sites aimed at teens that promote the use of cough syrup (dextromethorphan or DXM) to get high, and some 12th graders are admitting to purchasing prescription drugs Vicodin and Oxycontin online.

In spite of the overall positive trends, the National Institute on Drug Abuse has noted a couple of new areas of concern, including the non-medical use of prescription narcotics and marijuana among 8th-12th graders. Given the plethora of content about these and other drugs available online, school administrators must continue to remain vigilant over how students are using their institutions' networks for illicit activities by taking full advantage of the latest web-filtering and reporting technologies.

One of the most powerful web-filtering devices on the market for educational institutions, the iBoss Enterprise, has in fact just added a feature that allows keyword wildcard searches of reports to its already rich tool set. With keyword search, school administrators can quickly drill down into reports to accurately identify potential threats that cut across multiple categories rather than be limited to only the most common high-risk categories, such as 'Violence,' 'Adult,' 'Gambling,' etc., as displayed in typical web filter reports.

For example, to properly identify potential issues with prescription drugs, administrators can simply search the keyword *drug*, and the iBoss will present all related activity as it appears in each category. In addition, Call Outs will pull data from sites and present the administrator with the specific information a student entered in searches, blogs, and forums. So if a student searched "purchase oxycontin," the iBoss will present the user's information as well as the term searched to help clarify the threat.

The iBoss Enterprise Web Filter's granular reporting functions are maintained within the appliance and require no additional cost for third party licenses or hardware. Each iBoss appliance also handles over four million concurrent TCP/IP requests and incorporates stream-based URL filtering to allow access to select sub-URLs while blocking a base domain and vice versa.

"With student use of social networking sites always on the rise, it's essential for any web-filtering product to be able to search through all network activity in order to identify hidden threats. The ability to quickly and easily search for any term used across all search engines and blogs shortens an administrator's response time for addressing threats before a problem manifests," says Peter Martini, COO of Phantom Technologies.

Phantom Technologies' iBoss Web Filters offer powerful software-free web security solutions for educational organizations. The iBoss Enterprise combines HTTP/S, Layer 7 application filtering, packet shaping, and drill down reporting in an aggressively priced turnkey device that can be easily integrated into any school network.

The iBoss Enterprise can be purchased directly from Phantom Technologies at http://www.ibosswebfilters.com or from one of its Partners. For more information, please contact Marisa Salzman, Director of Marketing, at 877-742-6832, x 7807, or [email protected].  

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SOURCE Phantom Technologies