A new proxy appliance is purporting to safeguard companies and organizations from an Internet back door said to allow workers to seek and see online porn using organizational computers.
ProxySG maker Blue Coat Systems says the back door in question lets workers use Google or Yahoo image searches to see the porn even with ordinary URL filtering – but that ProxySG "acts as a 'middle man' to apply policies to Web communications between users on the network and the Internet."
URL-filtering classifies Websites into categories to grant or refuse access but does not list search results in the classification, Blue Coat said. "URL filtering is necessary, but not sufficient to block adult content in the workplace," said Blue Coat marketing vice president Steve Mullaney, announcing ProxySG. "The combination of URL filtering running on Blue Coat's proxy appliance provides the best solution for closing Web back doors for inappropriate content in the workplace."
ProxySG lets companies block inappropriate images without stopping their workers from using Google and Yahoo for business-related searches, the company said, with the proxy administrator setting up a simple policy to remake any image request to enforce Google or Yahoo safe-search actions.
The users, Blue Coat said, can enable safe-search preferences on either search engine that range from "strict filtering" (filtering out obscene content from image searches) to "no filtering" (which could return porn images), and the worker can turn the option on or off voluntarily, though it might bump up against the company's established use policies.
"Allowing our employees to access search sites is a necessary function of our business," said Fellowes enterprise technology manager Brad Hillebrand, whose company has bought and endorses the ProxySG program, "but when inappropriate material is accessed through those same sites, our business is put at an unnecessary risk. "We plan to leverage our Blue Coat ProxySG appliance to enforce the 'SafeSearch' capability so employees can continue to benefit from searching the Web for appropriate, business-related content."
