Blue Coat claims anti-phishing first

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 09 October 2007 05:51

Business IT - Security

The new real-time anti-phishing feature of Blue Coat ProxySG appliance is an industry first, the company claims.

Rather than simply checking URLs against a database of known phishing sites, ProxySG now sends unknown URLs to Blue Coat Labs for automatic analysis, just as the company's WebFilter product provides real-time classification (porn, gambling, etc) of unknown sites.

Blue Coat gave no indication of how the analysis is performed, referring only to "proprietary algorithms". The process is said to take between one quarter and three quarters of a second.

"Since the Web is constantly changing, it is important not to rely simply on protection from a static URL database," said Bethany Mayer, senior vice president of worldwide marketing.

"With new sites constantly popping up, the best protection for Web users comes from the ability to conduct real-time assessment and categorization, such as from Blue Coat Real-Time Anti-Phishing protection technology."