More Than 1,500 Mainstream Web Sites Have Recently Become Porn, According to Research From Websense Inc.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 31, 2002

High Rate of Web Site Domain Name Turnover Creates Legal Risks For

Companies

Today's information technology site is tomorrow's pornography site, according to new research from Websense Inc. (Nasdaq: WBSN).

More than 1,500 Web sites that six months ago were shopping bazaars, news portals and travel-related are now porn sites, reports Websense, the world's leading provider of employee Internet management (EIM) solutions. In addition, during the same period, more than 3,000 Web sites that featured pornography now offer mainstream content.

"Our research has shown that expired domain names change ownership daily and can often be recreated as porn sites," said Harold Kester, Websense chief technology officer. "It's critical then for companies to use an EIM product that reviews Web sites frequently to verify categorization of Web sites over time. Finding Web sites is one part of the solution. It's the frequent maintenance of Web site categorization that produces a superior database."

Domain name expiration problems have been much publicized in recent years. In fact, last month, Private Media Group, a Spanish-based porn producer, made a bid to buy the failed music-trading Web site napster.com domain name for the purpose of transforming it into a porn site. Conversely, last month the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill won a lawsuit against the operator of UNCGirls.com to transfer ownership back to UNC, bringing an end to the site's use as a provider of explicit sexual materials. However, despite these examples, many EIM vendors fail to recognize the magnitude of the problem, either not revisiting already-categorized sites or refusing to conduct regular DNS aging on sites as they come on- and off-line.

"Web site domain name changes can create a major legal liability risk for companies if their EIM software fails to pay attention to the constant change of the Web," said Jennifer Kearns, a labor and employment partner at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison LLP., a global law firm with offices in the United States, London, Oxford and Munich. "For example, companies may allow employees to visit business or entertainment Web sites, only to inadvertently let pornography Web sites enter the workplace -- creating the possibility for sexual harassment or hostile workplace lawsuits."

While innocent sites becoming pornography portals remains a key problem, Web site domain name changes can also create IT management frustration when they change from pornography to mainstream in nature. Employees that need to get to mainstream sites for research or work-related activities are accidentally blocked, leading to an increase in employee complaints and IT help-desk calls.

The Websense Master Database, the cornerstone of the market-leading Websense Enterprise EIM application, is refreshed every seven hours so as to keep up with the rapid change of Web site content. Recently named the top-ranked database in an independent industry study of EIM databases conducted by eTesting Labs, the Websense Master Database has been purged of more than 700,000 dead links to date.

Using proprietary technologies, Websense processes these dead links with a system called Websense Change Tracker, which performs quality control to confirm a site's context over time. Change Tracker re-fingerprints a Web site and compares it to an original fingerprint of the site. If there is sufficient "difference" between the fingerprints, the site is reviewed by a human Web analyst for database re-classification.

About Websense Inc.

Websense Inc. (Nasdaq:WBSN) is the worldwide leader of employee Internet management (EIM) solutions. Websense Enterprise software enables businesses to manage how their employees use the Internet, improving productivity, conserving network bandwidth and storage costs, and mitigating legal liability. Ranked the highest quality database in a recent test of EIM products, Websense delivers the most effective and comprehensive solution in the industry.

Founded in 1994, Websense serves more than 17,800 worldwide customers, ranging in size from 100-person firms to global corporations. These include more than half of the Fortune 500, approximately one-third of Japan's Nikkei 225 and half of the UK's FTSE 100, encompassing more than 13 million customer seats, pre-paid on a subscription basis. Websense has strategic technology relationships with Blue Coat Systems, Check Point, Cisco, Macrovision, Microsoft, NetScreen, Network Appliance, SonicWALL, Tumbleweed and others. For more information, visit www.websense.com.