White Papers for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)

Filtering the Spectrum of Internet Threats: Inappropriate Content, Spyware, IM, and P2P

St. Bernard Software

Because of the proliferation of Web-based threats, you can no longer rely on basic firewalls as your sole network protection. Most firewall rules are based on the IP address and network port but they don’t inspect the actual network traffic content. For example, consider blended threats that sneak into your company through email and entice employees to click external links that lead to a malicious Web site. Your firewall might recognize only legitimate traffic—in this case, an inbound email inbound and outbound Web request from an internal user. Attackers continue to evolve clever methods for reaching victims, such as sending crafty Web links through Instant Messaging (IM) clients or email, or by simply linking to other Web sites that your employees might surf. These links can lead to phishing attacks designed to lure victims into divulging personal information.

Shutting down access to these Web sites protects your employees and increases the security of your network. One effective defense to these types of attacks is to deploy a content-aware, perimeter-based network security device that inspects and blocks Web requests based on URL destination. Because the addresses of these threats morph and change regularly, choosing a solution that offers a subscription to an effective list of categorized Web sites lets you permit or deny a category while ensuring that you can effectively block in the background the hundreds of thousands of URLs associated with sites matching that category. This white paper examines the threats of allowing unwanted or offensive content into your network and describes the technologies and methodologies to combat these types of threats.Specifically, this paper looks at how you can leverage the features of the St. Bernard Software iPrism dedicated Internet filtering appliance to reduce your exposure to these risks and improve the overall security of your network.

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