A Global Defense for the Onslaught of New Threats
Blue Coat’s WebFilter sifts through content, categorizing domain names, directories and IP addresses for policy enforcement and security. In conjunction with Blue Coat appliances, it helps block malware and strain content according to strict policy controls.

WebFilter adds comprehensive protection against attacks from spyware, phishing, peer-to-peer traffic and viral content to your proxy gateways. A subscription means that the vast majority of URLs requested by your users are already covered “on-proxy” with ratings returned in less than eight milliseconds.

Blue Coat’s Dynamic Real-Time Rating (DRTR) technology uses artificial intelligence to categorize new Web pages “on the fly” the first time a user requests access. The DRTR service reads the context and evaluates each new Web page. If the DRTR service rates it with high confidence, it gets automatically pushed to the master database and keeps all other Blue Coat products current.

If the system can’t digest the site, it rates it as "other" or "unknown." These sites are pushed through the ad-hoc WebPulse™ community watch cloud service where it may be reviewed by humans who categorize and send the new rating to the database.

Dynamic Link Analysis
The transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 has been driven by “dynamic” content. Web pages are made up of multiple changing components like advertisements, news feeds, photos, videos or reference links to other content. In this environment, iFrame or SQL attacks inject links into popular Web sites that lead to relay servers and, eventually, hosts of malware downloads. Cyber-criminals also target popular search engine terms, pooling them into link farms that camouflage Web threats. Static, first generation URL databases that update infrequently have become an ineffective defense in this new environment.

Dynamic Link Analysis leverages a diverse global user community to profile more Web content and apply more defenses than any single user could ever maintain. Real-time inputs from this community into the WebPulse service, in addition to cloud-based analysis and updates, protect users from dynamic links to malware or other malicious content.

Immediate Protection through WebPulse Community Watch
The Blue Coat WebPulse community watch service builds a comprehensive profile of Web content with real-time inputs from both businesses and consumers to protect users from new and evolving threats. More than 54 million users of Blue Coat’s WebFilter and ProxyClient enterprise products (as well as users of K9® Web Protection, Blue Coat’s free software for consumers) send more than one billion requests to the WebPulse service weekly.

The WebPulse service leverages multiple threat engines along with machine analysis and human raters. Utilizing these analysis tools, the service provides immediate updates to the WebPulse database to protect all remote users and Web gateways against known and new malicious content. Growth of the user community compresses the analysis cycle for dynamic links and Web content.

WebPulse is the first cloud-based community watch environment to implement Dynamic Link Analysis and today receives more than one billion requests per week from more than 54 million users around the world. The service builds a comprehensive profile of the Web as users encounter new dynamic sites and user-generated content.

Accuracy Through Real-Time Usage
WebFilter includes more than fifteen million website ratings representing billions of Web pages. They’re organized into relevant and useful categories, providing choices administrators can make to align with the organization’s Internet filtering policy.

With the exception of malware sites (Blue Coat Labs™ actively deploys technologies to pursue these), the WebFilter database is driven by the actual web usage patterns of WebFilter users. This provides the relevance and accuracy of its contents.

As a result, WebFilter has an average 94% coverage rate of requested sites in enterprise deployments, coupled with an extremely low rate of false-positives. Thousands of users from all over the globe benefit from each others’ activity.

An online component of WebFilter, Blue Coat SiteReview, enables administrators and users to verify if a site is included in the Blue Coat WebFilter database and suggest alternative categorizations for the URLs in question.

Blue Coat WebFilter customers are automatically protected by the WebPulse service through ProxyClient for remote and mobile workers and can enable the service through ProxySG with a one-click option.

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