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 [...]
Web Filtering
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Barracuda Acquires Purewire
October 13th, 2009 · No Comments
Tags: Barracuda · Web Filtering
Astaro Now Blocks UltraSurf
February 26th, 2009 · 8 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Astaro · Bit9 · Firewall/UTM · Lumension · Ultrasurf · Web Filtering
Testing Web Site Accessibility
February 5th, 2009 · No Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Web Filtering · Web Utilities
Blocking Ultrasurf with a Sonicwall Application Firewall
January 19th, 2009 · 18 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Firewall/UTM · Palo Alto Networks · Sonicwall · Ultrasurf · Web Filtering
That One Feature
September 24th, 2008 · No Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Web Filtering · Websense
More Free Home Web Filtering
August 15th, 2008 · No Comments
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
Tags: Blue Coat · Web Filtering
8e6 Active Directory Constraints
August 15th, 2008 · No Comments
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.
Tags: 8e6 · Web Filtering
Web Filtering by Bloxx
August 13th, 2008 · 2 Comments
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.
Tags: Bloxx · Web Filtering
Flash Proxy to Bypass Filters
August 13th, 2008 · 3 Comments
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.
Tags: Web Filtering · Web Proxy
Firefox Auto-Update Leads the Pack
July 2nd, 2008 · No Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Firefox · Security · Web · Web Filtering