Every day students bypass your school's Internet filter with Web-based Proxies/Anonymizers, easily accessing sites and services like MySpace and IM/P2P, as well as exposing your network to malicious Web content. For districts and their over-burdened IT staff, constantly updating URL databases to detect and block Web-based proxies has become a time-intensive and costly task.

What are Web-based Proxies and How They Work
Web proxies are probably the most popular and successful way students bypass Internet filters today. Appearing as an unblocked Web page, a proxy anonymizer site allows a student to enter a URL address using a form that causes the proxy server to retrieve the web page despite being blocked by the school's Internet filter. By hiding IP addresses and information such as students' Web histories, proxy anonymizers prevent most Web filters from monitoring what students are viewing online.

It's Increasing and Easy to Build
The open-source community has made it so easy that a technical novice can start a proxy anonymizer site. All the student needs is a Web server and proxy anonymizer software, both of which are freely available from many different sources on the Internet. Once the student has uploaded the software to the Web server, that student and his or her friends can bypass the filter.

Why Most Filters Do Not Effectively Block Web-Based Proxies
Although most Internet filtering solutions include a "Web-Based Proxy" category in their databases, they actually fail at blocking access to Web-based proxies due to their "list-based" approach. Unfortunately their "list-based" database cannot keep up with the increasing number of new proxy sites, making it extremely easy for students to access proxy anonymizers and causing additional problems for overburdened IT staff.

8e6 Provides Zero Day Protection Against Web-based Proxies
In addition to its comprehensive "Web-based Proxy" category, 8e6 utilizes signature/pattern-based detection to block anonymous proxies on the fly, giving school districts zero-day protection against many open-source proxies. This allows network administrators to immediately identify new proxy anonymizer sites when they are created, rather than days or weeks later when they are added to the URL list.