• CIO.in
• White Papers
• The Latest Threat to Your Web Security

This whitepaper, written for executives and IT professionals, explores the growing dangers of anonymizers, an unfortunately very effective technique for circumventing Web use restrictions. The white paper also describes how the iPrism® solution from St. Bernard® combats anonymizer tactics through dynamic filtering and classification methodologies for superior Web protection from internal and external threats.

"Anonymization," in general, is as simple as users covering their tracks as they browse the Internet. One of the more prolific and easy to-use masking tools are collectively known as "Web-based proxy servers" or Web-based proxies." These Web servers, also known as anonymizers, forward client requests to other servers, but they remove identifying information from the web access requests.

Anonymizers have legitimate as well as suspicious uses. They protect IP address and related identifiers from web sites or hackers that seek to eavesdrop or surreptitiously extract information from unsuspecting Web site visitors. Anonymizer sites funded by nonprofits enable citizens of countries with repressive governments to communicate on the Internet without fear of reprisal.

Using ananonymizer is not illegal, but using one to conduct illegal activity without being traced is.

Anonymizer Web sites act as go-betweens. Users log onto a Web site and type in a destination, and the proxy server surfs the Web for them. The anonymizer then passes the results of the search back to their browser, often via an encrypted communications channel, to mask both the identity of the target Web site and the relayed contents.

Open-source anonymizer software kits allow people to create proxy servers on their home computers and access them from their workplace or schoolroom. These "one-off" anonymizers are extremely hard to detect because there is no Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for which an organization can search, just an innocent-appearing IP address.

• Application Modernization And Migration Trends In 2009/2010
• Application Modernization: Three High Payback Strategies
• A Case For Better Project Estimation & Planning And Estimating From Use Casess
• Progress Apama in Manufacturing – Complex Event Processing for Driving Bottom-Line Results
• The ROI of Defragmenting the Windows Enterprise
• A Window Into Mobile Device Security
• Computing as a Service - Securing Enterprise Cloud
• Web Threats 2010: The Risks Ramp Up
• Build vs. Buy: The Hidden Costs of License Management
• Protecting personally identifiable information: What data is at risk and what you can do about it
• Top Ten Web Threats and how to eliminate them
• Managing the Server Migration Process: The HP Approach to Reducing Operational Costsser
• Managing the Server Migration Process: The HP Approach to Reducing Operational Costsser
• Highly Available Virtualization With Microsoft Hyper-V and SCVMM 2008
• Forrester: Server Virtualization, Q3 2008
• Getting Started with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V On Dell Servers
• The ROI of Defragmenting the Windows Enterprise

CIO Newsletters

• CIO World

  Critical news & updates, delivered 5 days a week. View Sample

• CIO Alert

  Your weekly update on digital security and threat. Delivered every Friday. View Sample

• CIO Focus: Cloud Computing

  A Fortnightly capsule delivering the latest trends, opinions and features on cloud computing.