URL Filtering Trends Offer Glimpse into Employee Web Use Habits
- Monday, December 21, 2009, 12:01
- Threat Research
Posted on behalf of Dan Bleaken, Malware Data Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services
Symantec Hosted Web Security Service blocks millions of web requests every day to protect employees from content that is either against company policy, or malicious. In a typical week Messagelabs Intelligence performs 50 million blocks on 10 million distinct URLs for several thousand clients. That’s tens of thousands of blocks per client per week.
99.95% of blocked URLs are policy based. Of these, by far the greatest proportion is for advertising, mostly pop-up ads or auto-forwarding to ads. Also, Messagelabs Intelligence blocks sites related to Games, Chat, Personals & Dating, Adult/Sexually Explicit material, Violence, Tasteless & Offensive material, Weapons, Criminal Activity, Gambling, Illegal Drugs and so on. Clients have full control over what they consider to be against company policy. Each day, roughly 39% of clients have URLs blocked as policy, and on average there are just over 6,000 policy blocks made for each of those clients. Over a period of one week, almost all clients would have had a URL blocked as policy at some point.
The remaining 0.05% of blocks are malicious (but that could still be several tens of thousands of blocks in a week). The malicious blocks are tiny in proportion to all blocks but very important as they are of great risk to the client. Malicious websites are not
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