Blue Coat Systems said it has increased the frequency of updates from the Blue Coat® WebPulse™ service to the Blue Coat® ProxySG® appliances from 20 minutes to every five minutes to better protect customers from rapidly spreading Web-based threats.

Blue Coat Systems is a leader in WAN application delivery and secure web gateway.

With faster update cycles, ProxySG appliances can more quickly recognize and block malware hosts and attempted attacks that have been identified by the Blue Coat WebPulse service.

“The Blue Coat WebPulse service leverages the power of a large community of users to analyze more than 150 million Web requests per day in seeking out new sources of malware,” said Nidal Taha, Blue Coat Systems Middle East regional director.

'As threats proliferate across the Internet, it is important that enterprises have a multi-pronged defence strategy that both identifies the threats and rapidly protects against them.'

Blue Coat delivers that protection to its customers by utilizing the community power of WebPulse to rapidly root out malware and other threats.”

'The WebPulse service analyzes a large volume of traffic on popular and unrated sites using multiple threat engines, machine analysis and human raters to detect malware and rate new Web content,' he added.

To further protect the Internet gateway, the ProxySG appliances automatically enforce corporate policies that dictate how to handle unrated sites or known malware hosts.

This policy enforcement provides organizations with the control they require to effectively secure their networks.

Traditionally, malware has proliferated via email.  With the rise of Web 2.0 technologies and multi-object Web pages, however, malware has moved to the Web.

According to Sophos, a new Web page is infected every five seconds, which is three times the rate in 2007.  In this new environment, networks designed to protect only against email-based malware do not effectively prevent these Web-based attacks.

To effectively defend the Internet gateway against evolving threats that are increasingly moving to the Web, Blue Coat ProxySG appliances utilise a hybrid Web gateway architecture that provides five layers of defence.

'They are WebPulse Cloud service, inline detection, Web application and content controls, integrated data loss prevention and remote-user protection,' Taha added.-TradeArabia News Service