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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Know thy enemy. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. If you are an IT administrator charged with the task of securing your network, the most important knowledge you possess is an in-depth understanding of the threats you’re working to counter.

Some are external threats: How does malware propagate? What techniques does spam email use to evade detection? Some are internal threats: Which of my employees has access to sensitive data? Which programs are my users installing and using to get their jobs done, how do those tools work, and how do I secure them? And of course …

How will my users circumvent the security infrastructure of my network, inadvertently or otherwise?

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