AGAT

Categories
blog webex guides

Safe Content Inspection for Webex – Prevent harassment & bullying

The necessity for Content Filters

Sometimes security and compliance are just not enough to make sure that a business runs smoothly. There is one aspect of communication that goes barely unnoticed and still is problematic on many levels.

The advancement of technology has enabled everyone to collaborate and share information more easily. However, it has also provided another channel where harassment incidents may take place which can leave the person on the other end feeling unsafe. In the education industry, for example, students and teachers alike are required to follow a set of rules and proper practices to ensure a safe and reliable environment for all.

The corporate world must also ensure a safe environment for employees including anti-harassment policies as well as verifying that customer-facing communication is appropriate. 

Detecting unsafe content is not defined by clear rules, mostly because it is images and videos. Therefore, addressing this need requires serious machine learning involved in both detecting and avoiding false positives (labeling safe content as unsafe).

This necessity is universal and applies to small and big-sized organizations alike and especially, educational institutions that deal with minors.

Safe Content Inspection:

AGAT has introduced a new feature named Safe Content Inspection, which is now available for Webex.

By leveraging complex AI detection algorithms, AGAT is able to offer the technology that giants like Google or Facebook are currently using to keep inappropriate content away from their platforms.

The Safe Content Inspection solution inspects images -and soon videos- to detect unsafe content in the following categories:

  • Adult: the likelihood of the image containing adult content such as nudity.
  • Spoof: the likelihood that an image was modified to make it appear funny or offensive. 
  • Medical: the likelihood that this is a medical image.
  • Violence: the likelihood that the image contains violent content.
  • Racy: the likelihood that the image contains racy content such as sheer clothing or strategically covered nudity.

In Webex, AGAT’s technology is able to detect in real-time the content of the image and if it matches the categories set and take action to delete or notify on incidents identified.

As mentioned above, in the education industry, there are numerous cases where compliance, security, and institutional protocols demand tighter controls. For example, there might be a need to block 12th graders from communicating with 5th graders and restrict troublemakers from communicating with other students to prevent bullying at school.

Other than bullying, educational institutions would want to make sure a teacher is present in every communication in order to prevent student-only spaces where they might share inappropriate content under the watch of the school.

Large companies may set policies to prevent harassment in the workplace. With Webex Safe Content Inspection, companies can build a more professional environment and help employees feel less threatened.

Businesses also do not want their customer-facing team to be communicating inappropriately with clients, therefore, Safe Content Inspection can help prevent customer attrition and maintain a good image for the company.

Watch Safe Content Inspection in action:

To complete the security-compliance goals

SphereShield Safe Content Inspection was designed to help companies and organizations achieve a level of regulation and ethics needed to operate a business as it should be done.

If you would like to see a free demo of Safe Content Inspection, just Contact Us for a Free Demo Today.

Screenshots showing the solution in action:

Alice sending an image containing spoof (a funny face)

SphereShield deletes the image sent

SphereShield portal report on incident

Categories
Skype for Business SkypeShield Uncategorized

NeWay to distribute and implement SkypeShield’s security solutions in the US

AGAT Software has teamed up with NeWay Technologies, which will distribute and deploy SkypeShield in the United States.

As part of the agreement, Neway Technologies will market and implement SkypeShield’s authentication solutions for Skye for Business and other cyber security solutions by AGAT Software in the lucrative American market.

“We chose NeWay because of its extensive experience in the execution of complex and challenging projects in Microsoft environments in general and Skype for Business in particular,” said Guy Eldan, CEO of AGAT Software. “As the usage of SkypeShield in the US is expanding rapidly, we were looking for an on-the-ground integrator with proven abilities, and found Neway Technologies to be the perfect match.”

“A growing number of American corporations realize that they need to protect themselves against the risks arising from connecting mobile devices to Skype for Business servers,” said Ronen Ashkenazi, NeWay Technologies CEO. “We explored the security solutions offered on the market and came to the conclusion that SkypeShield is the best and most extensive one.”

NeWay provides end-to-end customer solutions for unified communications, including architecture, design, development and implementation of advanced communication systems. As part of its portfolio, Neway Technologies develops complementary solutions for Skype for Business and provides third-party products manufactured by its business partners.

As a pioneer in Skype for Business-based unified communications, NeWay has implemented large-scale projects for leading companies, including Dun & Bradstreet, Shearman & Sterling LLP and Deutsch Inc., Health First, and is working with others, such as Credit Suisse, to optimize and streamline their Skype for Business deployment.

NeWay benefits from the full support and recognition of Microsoft as a Gold Certified Partner in Communication. In addition, NeWay Technologies has been chosen as Lync Premier Support Partner providing 24/7 worldwide premium support, remote access for proactive troubleshooting, gateway monitoring, support for hardware replacements, installations, and more.

These advantages are supplemented by the unique range of products that NeWay Technologies develops on the Skype for Business platform and the integration of third-party solutions by business partners such as AudioCodes, Polycom and AGAT Software.

Categories
Uncategorized Microsoft Lync Skype for Business SkypeShield

New application firewall security solution for Skype for Business

SkypeShield has launched a new application firewall solution for securing guest and anonymous requests when entering corporate networks.

The need for the new solution arose because, as part of the Skype for Business (Lync) topology, requests are sent anonymously to the front server in the corporate network without being authenticated or inspected. Once allowed, these requests, which might contain malicious code, can pass through DMZ firewalls with no control.

The application firewall has the following security layers:

  • Request rewrite – session termination in the DMZ and rewrite of the request that is sent to the domain
  • Protocol level sanitization – inspecting the traffic to validate the structure of the traffic as expected by the protocol
  • Application level inspection – validating that the data content matches what is expected by the server
  • Device pre-authentication – performing device validation before allowing any request to enter the domain

“Common attacks take advantage of network protocol vulnerabilities to execute operations that are not approved by design. Some of these techniques generate or modify valid requests with data that look valid, but maliciously alter the server’s behavior. An example of a common concern handled by the firewall is blocking non-valid meeting ID in the DMZ,” said Guy Eldan, CEO of AGAT Software, which developed SkypeShield.

“SkypeShield’s new Application Firewall offers the best available solution for such security vulnerabilities by intercepting all anonymous Skype for Business traffic in the DMZ and validating them before allowing them to enter the domain network,” added Eldan.

In order to ensure that no malicious code is injected into a request, the solution passes each request through multiple security inspections and validation channels, including session termination and rewrite, protocol sanitation, data validating and device pre-authentication. By doing so, the risk of most protocol and application level attacks is eliminated, as the original request is not allowed to enter the domain.

The application firewall performs session termination of the request and creates a new request with the same parameters built as expected by the server schema. This concept blocks, by design, any extra code injected into the original request.

SkypeShield’s application firewall protects the internal servers by performing a wide set of sanitized filtering operations detecting malicious requests and blocking them from passing to the DMZ.