In our continuing efforts to broaden the coverage of our pattern filtering and application control, we have released a new set of patterns that block some of the more well known Remote Access applications and protocols. These include Virtual Network Computing (VNC), Remote Desktop (Terminal Services), GoToMyPC and Symantec’s pcAnywhere. In addition to these newly released patterns, we also leverage our URL filtering capability against web based remote access sites.

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On Tuesday, we took another step in broadening the Application Management functionality in our web filtering products. We released the first set of patterns for blocking network games, commonly called Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). We wrote patterns for World of Warcraft, Legend and the Steam Network, which is used by many games.

We also block a number of games through simple URL filtering. Some games rely on HTTP or HTTPS access to certain domains, so they can be shut down that way. Second Life and Lineage II are good examples of these.

There are two obvious issues with online games that should be of interest to enterprise and education IT departments: productivity and bandwidth. Cumulatively, online games have more than 16 million subscribers, with World of Warcraft alone accounting for more than 10 million of those subscribers. Blocking these applications at the gateway provides a simple, centralized way to prevent employees and students from violating what is undoubtedly already a part of your acceptable use policy.

This is the first expansion of application management in the R3000 beyond IM, P2P and proxies, leveraging a feature in the recently released 2.0.10 version of the R3000 that allows us to extend pattern coverage to any category. In the near future, we will be expanding the scope of our pattern blocking to include remote access applications like Terminal Services (RDP) and VNC, as well as streaming media protocols like RTSP.

Please submit requests for pattern coverage of other games and applications to mudcrawler [at] 8e6 [dot] com.

We have just released the latest version of our core web filtering appliance - version 2.0.10 of the R3000. General availability of the patch is set for January 7th, but you can contact Tech Support and request it today if you like. We’re going GA after the Holidays to reduce the load on Tech Support, which always sees a spike in activity after a major patch release (despite our best efforts).

There is lots of great stuff in this release. However, in this post I’m going to focus on the changes that affect how we handle proxies: improvements in our HTTPS filtering and pattern-based blocking. I’m going to cover:

• Block page on a pattern block
• New options that enhance HTTPS Medium and tame HTTPS High
• Whitelist feature for pattern detection

Let’s take a look at the details.

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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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