Jon's Network

Barracuda Networks has acquired Purewire, which offers a web security service. This will be the second service product Barracuda offers, the first being their backup service. I had never heard of Purewire until today. There are a couple of demos about their web security service available here. They offer the same protection strategy as something [...]

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Astaro now blocks Ultrasurf with version 7.4. The need and difficulty of this task for schools are so great that Astaro issued a press release to announce the new feature. Apparently they are doing this using SSL inspection (outbound SSL proxy) as opposed to using application signatures. Outbound SSL proxies introduce a new range of [...]

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If you can’t get to a website, you can quickly see if it’s because of the server at downforeveryoneorjustme. Or you can donate a datapoint to crowdsourcing effort Herdictweb: Herdict Web aggregates reports of inaccessible sites, allowing users to compare data to see if inaccessibility is a shared problem. By crowdsourcing data from around the [...]

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Organizations under pressure to keep students and employees from bypassing internet filters using client technologies, like UltraSurf are in a perpetual game of cat and mouse. A network admin I know used these steps to block it on his Sonicwall: Ultrasurf uses “140300000101″ for SSL ehlo messages. If you can block this signature with the [...]

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I know a company that recently paid a premium for Websense because of a single feature: An alert is sent to an administrator each time a user visits an unauthorized website. Most (all?) filters can report on such activity after the fact, but many don’t have the real-time alerting feature that this customer felt was [...]

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Along the lines of the free filtering you get when you use OpenDNS (that I mentioned here and here), Blue Coat has a free client designed to run on home computers: K9 Web Protection – Free Internet Filtering and Parental Controls Software

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Interesting limitation on the 8e6 AD integration For the AD Agent, it is currently has only been released for Active Directory environments with 2200 users or less.

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Web Filtering by Bloxx – Internet Monitoring Products This company looks like they have combined Vericept-like analysis with URL filtering in a single solution, but instead of merely logging everything, they actually block based on content. Not sure how well it works yet.

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A school district just told me about this anonymizer proxy that uses Flash. This URL is in the Websense database (I didn’t test it against any others) but I’m wondering if any vendors can detect this technique without blocking Flash altogether. flashform UPDATE: The thing doesn’t work right now, so never mind.

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Some interesting new research out of ETH Zürich showed that Firefox’s Auto-Update mechanism works the best at keeping users updated with the latest and safest version compared to all other major browsers. The report, Understanding the web browser threat, used Google’s browser data from the last 18 months to figure out a lower bound on [...]

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