The research into anonymous proxies is the third annual survey of its type carried out by Bloxx, the web content filtering specialist, and took in responses from 204 IT professionals.
According to Bloxx, 43% of education IT managers say that it takes between a day and week to detect and block access to new proxy sites, meaning that students will have unfiltered access to any website during that time.
The survey also found that more 60% of IT managers consider anonymous proxies to be a significant network security threat. In addition, the time spent dealing with anonymous proxies is also adding to the workload of IT managers.
The report reveals that, in education, 29% of IT managers are spending more time dealing with the problem compared to last year.
Eamonn Doyle, Bloxx' CEO, said that the volume and widespread availability of anonymous proxies continues to grow dramatically and there are now thousands of these sites created every week. "Students in particular are using them to easily by-pass web filtering so that they can surf the Internet free from any restrictions, oblivious to the associated security or safety risks", he said.
Doyle went on to say that students are very adept at finding new proxy sites and the existence of new sites will quickly spread across a school or college. "Unfortunately for many IT managers, by the time they have blocked access to the current proxy sites, students will already have found newer ones to move on to", he explained.
Bloxx reports that the traditional approach of blocking access to anonymisers using legacy filtering techniques such as URL lists or keyword scoring is no longer effective. Doyle says that that there are now several measures that organisations can take to tackle the problem of anonymous proxies.
"Organisations need to deploy a sophisticated web filtering solution that can detect and block anonymous proxies in real-time, alongside a clear and well enforced internet acceptable usage policy", he said.