Cisco builds in new filters for Dark Websites

Major router hardware player Cisco Systems is talking aim at sites in the Web that corporate managers would like to keep employees out of but have been unable to with conventional technology.

Every day, some employers of major corporations fritter away their time on social media, social networking, and porn sites, using proxy servers that allow them to escape detection, or spending time on churning sites that constantly change their URLs. Cisco Systems thinks that it has identified a new way to foil those workers, and to allow corporations to block their employees from those sites and keep them on the straight and narrow during work hours.

Cisco’s new system, IronPort Web Usage Controls, is supposedly able to identify as much as ninety percent of the content that IT managers do not like to let through their firewalls, identified by Cisco and others as the Dark Web. Cisco product line manager Kevin Kennedy says “The Dark Web is about corporate users’ inability to see how workers are using the Web. It is that dark, dynamic and churning part of the Web that has created the problem for business.”

Corporate employees are getting better every day at fooling the IT department firewalls and filters, using proxy servers and other techniques, according to an AFP article. This allows them to use Web sites during working hours that their employers would rather they did not. Logging directly into such sites generally leaves a record of how much company time employers are wasting. Proxy servers, however, have become a popular way to avoid being blocked or leaving any sort of trail. The same is true of “churning” sites, which constantly change their URLs to avoid detection, a popular ploy with internet operations such as porn sites.

Cisco’s Ironport system combines currently popular list-based filtering of known websites with a new component, a “dynamic engine” which reads Web pages to decide in real time whether content on them is something employers don’t want employees to see on company time. Ironport software is also trained to recognize proxy servers. Kennedy says, “We are doing pretty well; there is room for improvement;  You have to balance between catch rate and false-positive rate.” Still, the new Cisco Ironport system may be a valuable tool in the employer’s arsenal to keep employees from spending illicit time on the internet while at work.

• Cisco gobbles up Flip video camera maker
• Is Cisco spreading itself too thin with venture into server market?
• Cisco to buy Tribe: here comes a social networking disaster
• Cisco blames Apple for iPhone trademark row
• Apple asks Cisco politely for more time