How many times have you cursed your office firewall for blocking websites such as Orkut and Yahoo Messenger? If you think using a web proxy site can solve your problem, beware, the whole network could be corrupted.
Bhaskar Bakthavatsalu, country sales manager, India and SAARC, Check Point Software Technologies Ltd, says, ??Majority of web proxy sites are regarded to launch malware onto its visitors. A recent year-long Google study found that about 4.5 lakh URLs (websites) were launching malware and another 7 lakh URLs seemed malicious.??
Proxy servers reside between client application such as a web browser and a real server (say Orkut). Proxies are available freely on the net. They act as clients on behalf of the user. So, when using a web proxy server, users are connected to the server, not the web site in their browser. Once the page is returned, the proxy server forwards it to the users, isolating them from the internet.
A recent statistics by anti-virus company F-Secure states that about 100 to 200 viruses are released every single day. About 2.5 lakh malware were found in 2006. These malware include computer viruses, worms, Trojan Horses and spyware.
Normally, corporate firewalls are not designed to block content. They examine incoming or outgoing packets of information and allow or disallow their transmission or acceptance on the basis of a set of configurable policies. Its contents and context are ignored.
Hence, all that appears on your logs are connections to the proxy, which appears as harmless external web site. The IP address of the web sites or email provider that the company had blocked appears on the logs of the proxy server not yours.
However, Bhavin Turakhia, chief executive officer of web products company Directi Group, says, ??Not all firewalls are powerless to block proxies. In fact, network administrators can simply disallow connections to external HTTP proxies and force all web access through the corporate proxy server.??
