Jon's Network

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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Stan Trevena, IT director for Modesto City Schools, penned The Internet Filtering Battlefield and describes the constant struggle to keep student and faculty behavior inline with the acceptable use policy. This is important to keep students safe and to keep the district out of legal trouble. It is a great article that explains exactly how [...]

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I’m working with a midsize business looking to ditch their Surfcontrol/ISA setup. They want an inline filtering appliance and have already looked at Barracuda and 8e6 Technologies. The problem is they want most of the users filtered transparently (bridge mode proxy) and some using an explicit proxy. Barracuda needs two boxes to do this (one [...]

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When Blue Coat is under full load caching, filtering, scanning, authenticating, etc. just turn off caching and the thing will cough and sputter. You see, Blue Coat was once CacheFlow and their security policy engine, SGOS, was designed under the assumption that caching would always be there. For Blue Coat, caching isn’t a feature, it’s [...]

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In June 2006, Blue Coat Systems bought NetCache from NetApp. The purchase removed their largest competitor from the field and took a key partner away from another of their competitors. It also gave them 1000 new customers and all the support revenue they generate. Brilliant right? Yes, brilliant, but it can be a pain. Earlier [...]

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How do we protect companies from malware that no one has ever seen before? In this podcast we touch briefly on the well-known malware problem and how Webwasher tackles it at the gateway with their Anti-Malware Module. Using a combination of signatures, heuristics and behavior analysis (proactive detection in marketing lingo), they can stop more [...]

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Oliver Braekow, Webwasher product manager for Secure Computing, was the guest of the first Jon’s Network Podcast. Oliver explains how, using their SSL scanner module, Webwasher prevents malware from using HTTPS to communicate. It will also prevent users from bypassing traditional web content filters using popular CGI proxies. This is important to keep sensitive information [...]

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Plain-jane URL filters are no longer suitable as tools to enforce network acceptable use policies. (Were they ever?)  They are based on a list, and no matter how many college kids the web filtering companies pay to categorize all the sites on the internet, those lists will always be incomplete.  Using web proxies, end-users can [...]

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Many IT departments are concerned about end-user use of SSL web proxies to bypass their URL filters.  Most filters can’t see inside the SSL session, so they ignore it.  This renders the filter and the company policy completely useless.  You need a way to control use of these proxies to even think that you can [...]

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Here is how Packeteer can be used to control traffic through third-party proxies. Suppose some of your employees have installed web proxy tools (such as proxifier, proxster, and proxyshare) that allow them to send traffic (such as KaZaA, Morpheus, and ICQ) through an HTTP tunnel. Since HTTP traffic (port 80) can get through the firewall, [...]

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