As you know, 8e6Labs provided Olympic News and Olympic Streaming categories to our customers for the duration of the Olympics. Now that the Olympics are over we will be removing these categories from the 8e6 database. These categories will most likely make a return in two years for the 2010 Winter Olymics in Vancouver.

We will remove these categories in a library update on the night of Wednesday 9/3. You do not need to take any action, as these will be removed automatically.

I am specifically interested in how our customers used these categories. If you have a minute, please provide some feedback via the comments on how you used the Olympic categories. Did you block either of them, or were you monitoring them for over usage? Did you setup alerts in your Threat Analysis Reporter that would limit usage?

I think that these temporary categories can be a very good service that we could offer to our customers for periodic events like the Olympics and March Madness. The key is in knowing how you use them.

The past few weeks have been busy here at 8e6. I wanted to take a moment to update you on what has been happening.

R3000 2.1

I am proud to announce the release of R3000 2.1. This release has a very large number of features that will assist 8e6 customers in securing their network, and doing so on their terms. Enhancements to time-based profiles, quotas, and authentication management are just a few of the items available in this release. Get the whole list here.

Olympics

For the first time in history the technology is in place where a user can watch the entire olympics from their computer desktop. While this is an excellent pointer to the future of entertainment, it can also be an absolute headache for network and security administrators. Articles by Tech News World, SC Magazine and InternetNews have done a good job of discussing the issues that network and security administrators will be facing, so I won’t belabor the point here.

Instead I want to make you aware of what 8e6 has done to assist you with handling the Olympics on your network. We have added two new categories that will be available to all 8e6 customers for the duration of the Olympics.

Category Definitions:

• Olympics News: All sites associated with Olympics news, excluding those sites that host streaming video of the games themselves. Created so that customers can create a more granular acceptable use policy where they can allow users to visit news sites but prevent them from viewing video of the games. 
• Olympics Streaming Media: All sites that host streamlining video of the Olympic games. 8e6 has already added the primary sites that provide video of the games, and will continue to monitor and add newly created sites as the games continue.

These two categories should at the very least be monitored for use. If bandwidth becomes a problem you may want to consider blocking the Olympic Streaming category. You can also set thresholds in both the R3000 or the Threat Analysis Reporter that will block those users that are going over certain threshholds.

8e6 will continue to monitor the Internet for content related to these categories. On a side note, there has been a recent rash of sites that attempt to infect machines with malicious code masquerading as Adobe Flash Players. Streaming content such as the Olympics are a perfect avenue for attackers to target users. 8e6 will continue to monitor this, and update the library as needed.

MySpace/Facebook Worms

Web 2.0 sites continue to be a blessing, but a blessing with sharp edges. PCMag posts about some rapidly spreading worms in MySpace and Facebook. 8e6Labs has been monitoring these sites for quite some time. So far, we haven’t found any worms that wouldn’t be blocked (provided that you are blocking the Security category group) by the R3000. As always, we at 8e6Labs will continue to monitor these sites for any new activity.

New Vulnerability

A recent vulnerability report on the R3000 has been released via the normal channels (you can view it here.) We have already addressed this from a development stand point. The fix is currently being beta tested by a few of our customers and will be released in due course. If you would like to participate in the beta please contact our support department.