Cisco has rolled out new technology it says can help employers be much more effective at stopping employees from surfing to porn sites or to other sites deemed non-productive.
Meanwhile, a new study asserts that as many as 54 percent of U.S. companies ban workers from using social-networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace on company time. A survey of 1,400 CIOs by Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing firm, also found that 19 percent of companies allow social-networking use only for business purposes; 16 percent allow limited personal use.
These developments suggest it could soon become much harder to access favorite Web haunts while using corporate networks.
Cisco product manager Kevin Kennedy says that the Web content-filtering tools now used by companies have an Achilles’ heel. Only 20 percent of active Web links are accounted for on the blacklists used by such tools. And many workers, he says, have figured out how to use anonymous proxies — links that obfuscate the true Web address — to circumvent Web filtering.
That’s how Iranian protesters accessed their Twitter accounts, despite a blackout imposed by authorities to quell protestors during the Iranian presidential elections last June.
Cisco’s new tool is called Cisco IronPort Web Usage Controls. It analyzes each Web link an employee clicks to in real time, and can spot — and block — anonymous proxies that exist in what Cisco calls “the dark Web,” the 80 percent of URLs that aren’t accounted for by any blacklists.
So if your anonymous proxies can no longer circumvent your company’s Web filters, you’ll know why.