With the Internet housing its fair share of dodgy material, finding a way to prevent children accessing adult sites or other users accessing inappropriate sites can be difficult.

Securus is an Internet monitoring system that keeps a close eye on the actual text of a site as opposed to images. If a word or phrase that it recognises is found, it will take a screenshot.

Securus runs as a program rather than a service, but this did not seem to make it any less secure on the host computer. Attempts to stop it (such as via the Task Manager) failed and it's only possible to deactivate it with a password.

Passwords in Securus are not case sensitive, but once they are set they cannot be retrieved. It is not possible to uninstall Securus without deactivating it first, which requires the password.

The web interface is accessed via the icon in the Notification area. Plenty of help is provided, but we feel more emphasis needs to be placed on prompting to change the default password - without a secure password, there's not much point in using the software.

Securus comes with a list of preset keywords to look out for, but it's also possible to add words to the list in case there are specific worries you might have.

The default behaviour of Securus is to alert the user when a suspicious phrase is recognised with a splash screen. This screen can be removed for more discreet monitoring or locked with a password.

It is even possible to shut down the application that produced the offending text, but even Securus does not recommend this unless very young children are using the computer.

One issue it that the web-log only records sites visited with Internet Explorer. Securus is working on support for Mozilla Firefox, but any key phrases displayed are still recognised and recorded.

Securus is best suited where there is a reasonable dialogue with the users being monitored, although the lockdown options should give peace of mind should this break down.

By concentrating on text rather than fancy and unreliable image recognition, Securus is a serious tool and one that will no doubt appeal to parents. 

System requirements:
Pentium 166MHz
64MB of Ram
2GB of hard disk space
Internet Explorer
Windows 98SE or higher