Netsweeper: The Quiet Canadian Company Helping Telcos Fight Scams and Build a Safer Internet

In the global race to secure the internet, some of the most consequential players are not consumer brands or social media giants. They are the infrastructure companies working quietly behind the scenes—inside telecom networks, school systems, and national digital ecosystems.

Netsweeper Inc. is one of them. Hisyam Halim, sales director for the APAC region at Netsweeper, says, “Our unique advantage is our zero-latency, zero-network-risk web-filtering technology across every piece of equipment. This allows telcos to deploy our solution without concern about any impact on the network.”

Halim will visit Taiwan and attend Computex 2026 in June on a Canadian trade mission trip.

Founded in 1999 by Perry Roach and Lou Erdelyi in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, Netsweeper protects over 1.2 billion users in its network footprint using AI technology to effectively identify harmful content, contact, conduct, and commerce in real-time.

Localized in 47 languages, and with over 90 filtering categories, Netsweeper have accrued and strategically categorized 12 billion URLs to date and receive requests for over 50 million new URLs each day.

Among its early and major clients is the London Grid for Learning, a non-profit organization. Through this non-profit, Netsweeper provides over 3,000 schools with filtered broadband connections that are safe for two million schoolchildren to use.

Outside education, which accounts for half of its business, Netsweeper works with telecommunications service providers in Europe and Asia to protect their customers on the first line of defense against attacks launched by malicious and fraudulent websites.

Zero Latency

He stresses that zero latency—meaning absolutely no slowdown in online traffic—applies throughout the entire flow of online traffic. Optimal effectiveness is achieved when Netsweeper’s web-filtering technology is combined with two small pieces of general-purpose equipment that telecom companies typically already have installed in their infrastructure: passive optical taps and a network packet broker.

Using a single Intel Gold Xeon 32-core CPU–powered server, or a comparable one—Intel dominates more than 90% of the servers used by telecom companies—Netsweeper can filter up to 300,000 web requests per second, serving approximately one to three million internet users. “Our internet filtering solution does not slow down internet traffic and does not become a risk to the network,” he says.

The proliferation of online scams and phishing, along with the pervasiveness of child pornography and illicit content harmful to children, has propelled the company’s web-filtering technology to the forefront of online safety.

Real-Time Safeguard

Backed by a massive database of website addresses accumulated over the years, Netsweeper’s AI-based filters inspect web traffic within a telco’s network to detect fraudulent websites—particularly scam, phishing, malware, and deceptive sites—using an AI-driven, real-time categorization engine. This engine categorizes over 100 million new URLs each day. The most recent categories added last year include “self-harm” and “generative AI.”

Once a threat is identified, and depending on the policy set by the telecom operator, Netsweeper can block the web request, preventing users from accessing scam websites. These proactive steps help reduce the negative impact of online scams on users.

By detecting and blocking scam URLs within the telco network, users are protected even if they click on scam links in phishing SMS messages from fake BTS (Base Transceiver Stations), Facebook ads, Telegram channels, or messages from known contacts whose devices have been compromised.

A real-time response is possible because one copy of online traffic is created through the telecom’s passive taps using port-mirror–based or passive filtering.

Online Safety

Globally, Halim says Netsweeper’s technology is deployed to protect one billion internet users, with several hundred million of them in India alone.

A common misconception about Netsweeper’s technology is that it can directly inspect the content of posts or websites. In reality, it inspects about 1% of total online traffic bandwidth in an out-of-band deployment.

“Our technology works only at the website level,” Halim says. “We don’t see the pages on the network because they’re encrypted… we don’t see a Facebook post.” Netsweeper’s telecom-grade web filtering technology screens destination websites that users attempt to visit. Because everything between websites and users is encrypted, the urgency lies in detecting fraudulent websites in real time—within milliseconds—before a mouse click or a swipe on a mobile screen.

Corporate Social Responsibility

In 2019, Thailand’s telecom company Advanced Info Service (AIS) partnered with Netsweeper to launch a web filtering service tailored for children as part of AIS’s corporate social responsibility initiative. Shortly afterward, AIS stock was recognized in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices.

The call for telecom companies to take a proactive role in protecting young users has gained urgency worldwide, especially concerning child sexual abuse materials.

“It’s a big problem in the Philippines, where the victims are,” Halim says. “But those websites should be blocked elsewhere because those are customers there. In Europe, many operators block it voluntarily. There’s no law, everyone is liberal, but they will say, ‘No, we do not allow it.’ At a minimum, out of social responsibility or morality, they do it. These are not commonly accessed websites.”

Netsweeper sells its technology to telecommunications service providers in Europe and Asia. Halim says many European telecoms voluntarily block sexually explicit content involving minors, even in the absence of national regulations requiring them to do so. “It is an issue everywhere. It’s the minimum thing,” he notes. “There is no excuse to defend it. No one can say, ‘I won’t block it because of internet freedom.’ Nobody says that.”

Netsweeper’s European clients include CGI Norge AS in Norway and Odin Group B.V. in the Netherlands, both operating in education compliance.

“Our idea is always to encourage telcos to create products that are safe for children, based on the concept of safety by design,” he says. “Content will be filtered for pornography, gambling, phishing, all the bad stuff, without parents having to worry about setting up a phone, downloading apps, or configuring child protection settings.”

Original article was posted on TechSoda