[Thanks to Tarun Mann, a Sales Engineer here at 8e6, for providing the background information for this post.]

The other day I was talking to an 8e6 reseller and he brought up a question that I’ve heard a few times before. He has a customer who wants to prevent users from downloading executable files directly off the Internet. Obviously, the web filter / secure web gateway is the place to enforce this policy.

Although we don’t have a specific feature in the 8e6 web filter (the R3000) directed at this request, our crafty Sales Engineering team has devised a solution. They’ve deployed this solution in many of our customer’s networks - it’s simple and it works.

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I occasionally get emails from new customers, usually just after they’ve installed the filter for the first time, that read like this:

“How come you guys don’t have proxy.example.com in your database?? I can’t believe you don’t block this proxy! It’s the first one I found!”

They are almost always correct when they say that we didn’t have some given proxy site in our Library. We have many, many thousands of proxy URLs in the Library, but certainly not all of them.

However, they are almost always wrong when they say that we don’t block it.

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I worked for many years at Symantec in the Enterprise Security Group, where I wrote a slew of code for Symantec’s antivirus and client security products. In my time there, I talked to lots of IT Admins who were tasked (saddled?) with the responsibility of managing huge deployments of desktop security.

Their most difficult problems were always in the area of installation and deployment. Things like: How can you help me find all of the computers on my network that need AV installed on them? Can your product identify the source of an infection, so I can go find that computer and clean it up? It was all about managing and probing those dark corners of the network where desktop security wasn’t already deployed.

The solution is to use the security products that are at your gateway.

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