Cisco on Thursday launched software that shines light on potentially troublesome Web sites hidden in what the US firm dubbed the “Dark Web.”
Cisco IronPort Web Usage Controls promise to identify as much as 90 percent of “egregious” content that has escaped detection by business IT managers and security applications because of its stealthy nature on the Internet.
“The Dark Web is about corporate users’ inability to see how workers are using the Web,” Cisco product line manager Kevin Kennedy said. “It is that dark, dynamic and churning part of the Web that has created the problem for business.”
Computer users are growing increasingly savvy about sidestepping Internet filters, using proxy servers and other techniques to mask which Web sites they visit while at work, Cisco said.
For example, if workers log into Facebook from an office computer someone in the IT department can typically tell how much time they fritter away at the social-networking Web site.
However, if the employee connects to Facebook through any of thousands of proxy Web sites set up daily, all an IT department monitor will see is a nondescript Internet address as the online destination, Kennedy said.
Blocking pornographic Web sites on work computers typically involves using filter software based on lists of known online adult-content locales.
Internet porn purveyors constantly changing URLs, Internet addresses, in a practice referred to as “churning,” Cisco said.
“It’s happening and businesses don’t necessarily see it,” Kennedy said of workers circumventing company constraints on online access to Web sites for gambling, porn, hate speech and other material that can cause legal woes.
“Most people are pretty well behaved at work, but some are not,” Kennedy said.
“Using an anonymous proxy is sophisticated to us, but the kids that have graduated from colleges in the past five years are very aware of using software to get to proxies,” he said.
The Dark Web has been formed largely as a result of a tidal wave of Web pages triggered by Web 2.0 trends in user-generated content such as blogging and social networking, Cisco said.
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