News
Symantec and VimpelCom Enable Safe Access to the Internet for Children
February 2012 by Marc Jacob
Leading Russian telecommunications operator provides value-added services to its customers, leveraged by Symantec security solutions
VimpelCom and Symantec Corp. have announced a new Parental Control service, an integrated network-based online security service, which combines internet filtering, internet surfing reports, and network-use time control. The service, which is built on leading-edge Symantec technologies, is already available via VimpelCom’s network in Russia under the Beeline brand.
The service uses the clean pipe principle which blocks online content deemed malicious or inappropriate, and does not deliver it to internet users with the enabled service. Internet filters installed at the network level analyze 70 million web sites in 100+ languages, and also continuously updates the database by analyzing 10 million new web sites annually. A unique feature offered by the Parental Control solution is the automatic categorization of new frequently visited web sites, and their addition to the database.
For customers’ convenience, the implemented solution offers different categories of content-management, including those based on the user’s age. Age group categories are defined as follows: under 7, 7-12, and over 13 years of age, where each category filters sensor content that has been defined by psychologists as inappropriate for each of these age groups.
Furthermore, parents will be able to bar several categories in addition to age group restrictions by choosing to block games, online shopping, file sharing, online communications and advertising. Simultaneously, access to search engines and encyclopedias remains open to all age groups, however, search results with inappropriate content are filtered-out and only those returns with fitting content will be displayed.
"Developing the solution, we focused on industry best practices, and tried to make the activation process and the features of the service as simple and clear to parents as possible,” said Olga Turishcheva, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development OJSC VimpelCom. “As we were striving to provide a worry-free and safe online environment for children, we were also focusing on preserving the functionality of the Internet as a primary source for finding information. The scale and network capabilities of the solution offered by Beeline will allow customers who activate the service to be 100% confident that their children see only appropriate and suitable resources on the Internet.”
The technology is based on the Symantec Next Generation Network Protection (NGNP) platform, a network-based policy control and enforcement solution that allows a communication service provider to dynamically apply user preferences in a consistent fashion to a variety of services and bearers. This innovative industry leading technology was chosen over those of 11 competitive vendors. It allows the monitoring of network traffic with deep packet inspection, and eliminates malware before it reaches end-user devices.
The solution uses a website categorization database, provided by RuleSpace (now a subsidiary of Symantec), a recognized global leader in parental control services; URL filtering, safe search, context advertising, and content audit. With 65-million URLs and over 350-million users globally, RuleSpace’s database is the largest and most detailed database of websites and their categories. “To implement the project, we used the most advanced technologies, and proven experience gained from working with leading telecom providers in the U.S. and Europe; at the same time, we took into account all local
requirements, such as detailed categorization of the Russian internet segment, support for the categorization of sites in the .ru zone, and the new Cyrillic domain .??“, said Gary Thomassen, Director of Business Development for EMEA, Symantec.Cloud.
Service availability and future plans
Parental Control and Network Antivirus services are currently available for home internet users n Moscow region. Service availability in other regions/countries as well as mobile services support will be announced additionally
