Snitch helps find inappropriate files hidden on your computer's hard drive

Downloading and storing porn on a home computer or work system is typically frowned upon by the owners of the systems in question, and other users of the same computers, especially when children may inadvertently be exposed. For this reason, people often take special steps to hide their stash of pornography from other computer users, especially at work or in the home environment.

Snitch porn detection software uses a range of techniques to perform a porn scan through all files on your hard drive and find inappropriate material. As part of its testing arsenal, it incorporates several tests which can reveal porn files that have been intentionally hidden. Snitch products can detect hidden porn including:

• Porn files that have been hidden by renaming, or changing extension (eg. from .jpg to .txt)
• Hidden porn files inside compressed archives like ZIP and RAR files
• Porn hidden deep inside nested folder structures eg. documents\accounts\tax\backups\myporn
• Porn scattered randomly around the hard drive so it is harder to locate
• Porn hidden inside another file's ADS stream (PinPoint Auditor
  only)

Let's talk about these in more detail.

Renamed files and changed extensions

A file extension gives the operating system notification that this is a file of a specific type, and it needs to be opened with a specific program. For example the extension '.jpg' on an image like 'picture.jpg' tells the operating system that the file is a JPEG compressed image, and that to open the file it will need the image viewer associated with that image type, for example Windows Photo Viewer. By changing the extension to say 'picture.txt', the operating system will not use an image viewer to open it, so it will be effectively 'hidden' to the casual user. Snitch can be configured to open every file and analyse it to determine whether it extension matches its file type, and if it is not, Snitch will report it in a separate section in the results area.

Incidentally the name of the image file does not affect detection of inappropriate visual content in the image, but it can factor by applying an offset if suspicious keyphrases are present. For example, 'naked.jpg' will be treated as more suspicious because of the presence of a suspicious keyword, but even if it is called 'spreadsheet.jpg' it will still be considered suspicious if it contains nudity or adult content.

Hidden porn inside compressed files

Sometimes users hide pornography inside compressed archives such as ZIP files and RAR files. Once again the intent is to make it more difficult for casual users to find the material without knowing what they are looking for. This poses no problem for Snitch. During a porn scan, Snitch can open the compressed file and test any contain files to see if they are pornographic, in the same way that other files are tested.

Files hidden in deep directory structures

A typical Windows computer can contain many thousands of file folders, and searching through these manually can be extremely time-consuming. People intent on hiding porn sometimes feel it is enough to store their illegal porn files deep down in innocuously named folders, for example, a casual user probably would not be that interested in digging into a folder tree that looked like this:

But the depth of the folder tree is of no consequence to Snitch, it will happily analyse files in any folder structure, and therefore will detect any hidden porn regardless.

Alternative Data Streams (ADS)

The NTFS file system has a feature known as 'alternate data streams'. In simple terms, this allows multiple pieces of data to be associated with a single file name in such a way that only one of the streams will be opened when you double-click the file. Without getting too technical, PinPoint Auditor
can check for and test any alternate streams associated with the files in the scan path, and therefore find any hidden material that has been stored within them. This is particularly useful for detecting network porn on enterprise networks.

As we have seen, Snitch is a very capable porn eraser tool, and is designed to detect a number of different hidden file types. For more information, download the free trial, or read more about Snitch products here. For further information about PinPoint Auditor
, click here.

Download a free trial of Snitch HERE or Click HERE to buy Snitch

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