Channel partners that use social networking sites to connect with their customers became a little bit safer due to a unique partnership between Websense and the URL shortening company bit.ly.
Websense announced this week that it started working with bit.ly to prevent hackers from abusing the shortening service and tricking users into visiting sites hosting malicious content. One of the leading URL shortening services for social networking sites such as Twitter, bit.ly and others like it have been subject to a wide spectrum of chicanery carried out by the bad guys of the Internet. These types of services offer malicious hackers a reliable way to hide the actual contents of a URL, offering the means to fool even knowledgeable users into visiting seedy sites.
Websense will help protect bit.ly users by analyzing content behind bit.ly shortened addresses using the carrier-grade Websense ThreatSeeker Cloud. This security-as-a-service offering will conduct full content analysis for the IP sources, websites and web content behind bit.ly links. This includes categorization and rputation analysis of the full URL, with heuristics performed on the history, age, geography and search reputation of the site. If Websense finds the URL to be a malicious site, bit.ly will show an alert and give the user the choice of whether or not to continue.
"With the Websense security-as-a-service API powering our security intelligence, we will be able to better serve our customers and enable their use of Web 2.0 social media technology while protecting them from the latest threats," said Andrew Cohen, bit.ly's general manager, in a statement about the partnership.
According to Websense security experts, providing such protection on an exponentially growing service such as bit.ly would have been near impossible under traditional security models. In October alone, bit.ly processed over two billion shortened URLS and by the end of the year it plans to process over a million links per day through the Websense engine. The only Websense could work on such a huge and rapidly expanding scale is through the cloud, says Devin Redmond, Websense vice president, product management and business development.
"The security issues Websense addresses for URL shortening services and social media users would have been impossible only a few years ago -- and today this protection is only made possible by our breakthrough, scalable cloud-based security-as-a-service infrastructure," he said
Feb 4th 5:34 PMFinding Myself My Own New Adventure - So this is my last column with Channel Insider. After selling my MSP, Ive take... http://t.co/XGWd1Ryl
Feb 2nd 5:39 PMLevel Platforms to Offer Mobile Device Management - Answering the call of so many MSPs, Level Platforms is expanding... http://t.co/hsqwAFxN
Feb 2nd 3:45 PM10 Key Ingredients That Have Made Apple So Successful - Apple is one profitable company. The firm announced recently... http://t.co/ipuOvDig
Feb 2nd 1:55 PMChannelEyes: Will It Transform the Channel? - If the 2000 decade was about automation for the IT services channel, t... http://t.co/SrvhN2xG
Feb 1st 11:45 AMIBM Expands Mobility Management, Security - IBM has unveiled a solution to mitigate the risk that comes with a bring... http://t.co/VcyVQ4HA
Feb 1st 5:43 AMXerox Expands Cloud Services, Data Recovery for SMBs - The cloud backup and data recovery services are designed to p... http://t.co/DloBWniQ
Jan 31st 1:45 PM10 Reasons RIM`s New CEO Won`t Fix the Company - Research In Motion, at long last, has a new CEO in Thorsten Heins. ... http://t.co/JGo2Z9ar
Start the New Year with business intelligence—it’s a smart move
Join us on February 1 for an encore rebroadcast at either 5 am or 12 noon EST and discover how business intelligence (BI) supports companies in uncertain business and economic climates. Get expert advice on how to create a strategy that fits your organization's needs and budget and see how quickly it can pay for itself. Click Here
