Tag Archives: acceptable use policies

Wavecrest Computing Releases Cyfin VPN Usage Reporting

Wavecrest Computing proudly announces the release of Cyfin’s new feature, VPN Usage Reporting. Cyfin is a leading employee Web-use analysis and reporting solution for a wide variety of gateway devices and log file formats.

Wavecrest, a global leader in employee Web-use management, monitoring, and analytics solutions, today announced the release of Cyfin’s newest feature, Virtual Private Network (VPN) Usage Reporting. VPN usage reporting supports today’s increased need to monitor remote employee Web-use while reducing the concern of extending enforcement of Acceptable Use Policies (AUP), managing productivity, and monitoring time online.

The new VPN usage feature adds the capabilities of monitoring the number of active sessions throughout the day, seeing when most people connect and disconnect, determining who has not connected recently, visibility into and responding to unexpected disconnections and excessive invalid login attempts or failures to connect, and more.

“Right now many businesses are in the state of flux, and may remain that way for some time,” notes Dennis McCabe, CEO of Wavecrest. “The remote and distributed workforce has always been part of Wavecrest’s focus, especially with our CyBlock product lines. Now, with VPN usage being an integral part of today’s business environment, we are excited to increase Cyfin’s features to satisfy even more of what customers look for when supporting their workforce. We know that continuing to advance our products allows businesses more freedom and flexibility to operate with any workforce distribution that they require, without having to worry about losing key visibility.”

Comprehensive yet easy to use, Cyfin’s customizable reporting capabilities supply audience-specific Web-use information with reliable metrics, easy-to-read reporting dashboards, manager-ready detailed audit reports, VPN usage reporting, IP segmenting, and more.

For more information, visit https://www.wavecrest.net.

About Us
With over 20 years of proven history Wavecrest provides reliable, accurate Web-use management, filtering, reporting, and analytics products worldwide across every industry. Managers, C-Suite, IT, HR, MSPs, Auditors, and more trust Wavecrest’s Cyfin and CyBlock products to easily decipher and manage real employee Web activity, gain visibility into the distributed workforce, reduce liability risks, improve productivity, save bandwidth, and control costs. Trusted by large government and commercial organizations such as US-CERT Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Justice, USPS Office of Inspector General, National Grid, Johns Hopkins, and a growing list of global enterprises and government agencies. We are a proud long-term GSA contract holder. For more information on the company, products, and partners, visit Wavecrest at www.wavecrest.net.

Requirements of an effective employee Web-use management program

Because managing employee Web use deals with humans and their actions, it is a continuous process for all sizes and types of businesses, where the goal is to ensure employees use Web access safely for productive, work-related purposes. To attain a high level of success, I believe that this process requires a Web-use management program be put in place that involves many key players in the organization, communication of the company’s Web-use policy, implementation of a reliable tool to monitor and control Web use, and other important activities. In this article, I will discuss the requirements of an effective employee Web-use management program and the activities involved that will bring about safe and productive Internet use by the workforce.

The key ingredient in an effective program is collaboration and communication among the various groups in the company, i.e., senior management, Legal department, IT personnel, HR personnel, department managers and supervisors, and employees. Communication would include IT keeping company stakeholders informed about current hacker threats, as well as HR apprising senior management of pertinent employee Web-use behavior. Collaboration would occur among HR, IT, and department managers in training the workforce. Collaboration would also take place between IT and department heads to select the appropriate Web monitoring and filtering tool.

If you don’t have one already, another necessity of a Web-use management program is to develop a sound Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) consistent with corporate culture. The AUP should describe acceptable and unacceptable Web-use behavior, i.e., company rules for what constitutes desirable, acceptable, unacceptable, and abusive use of the Internet and other network resources. The policy should also clearly state how compliance will be monitored and what the consequences will be to employees abusing the use of network resources. Does your company have an AUP in place that spells out the rules to your employees?

To ensure adherence to the Web-use policy, it should be clearly communicated to the entire workforce, including management, informing them of what is and what is not acceptable in easily understood language. You may also want to have employees acknowledge that they read and understood the policy through a signed acknowledgement. HR and management personnel should hold meetings with workgroups to answer questions and provide any additional information. This fosters open communication in the workplace and allows employees to be more engaged in proper Internet usage.

In addition to communicating the policy to all concerned, another requirement of an effective Web-use management program is training employees on how to use Web access productively and safely. Whether training is conducted or coordinated by HR or in collaboration with managers and other department personnel, training sessions should cover Internet usage and related subjects. Specifically, employees need to be made aware of what sites they are visiting and what they are clicking on the Web. The purpose of training should be to encourage proper, productive, and safe use of network resources while reinforcing the information in the AUP.

An important requirement of a Web-use management program is to use a reliable software tool that is designed specifically to monitor compliance with Web-use policies and proactively control Web access. The tool should also include a smart reporting engine that distinguishes between user clicks (visits) and unsolicited traffic (hits) and easily presents accurate and up-to-date Web-use data, identifying desirable Web usage as well as unacceptable use and trends. Does your tool include a Smart Engine that analyzes Web traffic to better interpret human behavior? Does it generate easy-to-read, manager-ready reports? Does it give details on employee Web use with drill-down reporting capability? These are key features of a Web monitoring and filtering tool that will benefit IT, HR, and department managers.

Another activity that is necessary is following up with corrective actions when inappropriate Web access is detected. With a policy in place, personnel oriented, the workforce trained, and your Web monitoring and filtering solution actively monitoring and controlling Web use, there are still more activities to do. The tool will inevitably reveal patterns of inappropriate use or disclose signs of outright abuse. These incidents will require attention by HR and management personnel. After identifying the problems, management can take appropriate follow-up actions, such as counseling employees, training or retraining workers, changing work processes, and revising or clarifying the AUP. Managers may also need to institute follow-up audits on individual users and, in worst case, take disciplinary action including termination.

The final element of an effective employee Web-use management program that I will cover involves the establishment of a continuous improvement process by the collaboration team, i.e., HR, IT, department managers, etc. In this process, there would be frequent reviews of employee Web use, new Web services introduced into the network, and new security threats, modifications of work processes, and appropriate revisions of the AUP. All company stakeholders would be involved. What other activities have been effective in your company in managing employee Web use?

Unauthorized Web use can degrade workforce productivity, impact network performance, threaten network security, and create legal liabilities. Any of these outcomes can seriously impact your bottom line. An effective employee Web-use management program is essential to prevent this from happening. If the responsibilities of an effective program are carried out well, misuse and abuse of network resources will be minimized without damaging workforce engagement and morale. Getting accurate, actionable information to all collaborators is a must, and the tool that you are using should be able to provide this information. Next time I will discuss how to get this information with reliable metrics generated by a reporting tool.

Analyze Your Encrypted Traffic With CyBlock SSL Inspection

In huge numbers, more and more organizations, particularly e-businesses, are using Web-enabled applications that involve the use of personal, private, and sensitive data. Banking, online shopping, and credit card transactions are good examples, but by no means the only ones. SSL encryption is being increasingly used to protect the confidentiality of this business and personal data on the Web. Surveys show 25%-35% of enterprise traffic is SSL-encrypted, and the number can be as high as 70% in specific industries. SSL encryption is the most cost-effective way of protecting the privacy of this traffic.

While SSL encryption solves many privacy-protection problems, it can allow traffic that poses security threats–both inbound and outbound–to pass through security protection measures uninspected and unchecked.

Inbound Problem.  SSL encryption creates security blind spots in incoming traffic. The traditional security infrastructure that protects an organization is blind to the threats in inbound SSL traffic and provides an easy vehicle for criminals and hackers to hide their cyber attacks.

Outbound Problem.  In addition to the risks of incoming threats hiding over SSL channels bypassing security protections, outbound enterprise traffic is now a growing problem. This is becoming quite a “hot button” for security applications (e.g., content filtering applications) that tackle data loss prevention (DLP), compliance reporting, and lawful intercept. In the past these solutions could see what was outgoing, but now they are suddenly “in the dark” when it comes to the data transferred over SSL.

From a security standpoint, most organizations already deploy an array of network and security appliances and programs to protect their enterprise, enforce internal corporate acceptable use policies, and satisfy external government regulation. Unfortunately, in many instances, they can only inspect plaintext traffic and are unable to inspect HTTPS communications for attack signatures. This makes it difficult or impossible for network administrators to enforce corporate acceptable use policies or ensure threats, such as viruses, spam, and malware, are stopped before they reach individual users.

In addition, without the ability to examine the contents of HTTPS communications, network administrators leave open the possibility for information to be accidentally leaked out of the enterprise or worse, stolen. Regulatory compliance requirements, including identifying accidental or intentional leakage of confidential information, are also virtually impossible to meet because of HTTPS encryption.

CyBlock SSL Inspection gives network administrators the ability to monitor this SSL-encrypted traffic and to identify and respond to any undesirable content. The total HTTPS inspection process decrypts, analyzes, categorizes, and then re-encrypts the traffic. If necessary, specific standard and/or custom URL categories can be exempted from the inspection process; this is known as “tunneling.” In addition, full URL information in a number of Wavecrest audit reports is available to network administrators.

To learn more about how CyBlock SSL Inspection can protect your sensitive data, please see our SSL Inspection Tech Brief or contact Technical Support at (321) 953-5351, Ext. 4 or support@wavecrest.net.

Source:  Examining SSL-Encrypted Communications – Netronome

Wavecrest’s 13th Birthday

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We’re Wavecrest Computing, a leading developer of Internet usage management products. Today is our thirteenth birthday. So we’re taking a moment to celebrate, look back, and reflect on some of our accomplishments over the years.

Since 1996, from our base in Melbourne, Florida, we have developed, marketed and supported a spectrum of innovative Internet monitoring and reporting solutions. Our products help all types of organizations manage their employees’ online activities and ensure compliance with acceptable use policies. Starting thirteen years ago with a single customer, our client base has grown to more than 3,000 organizations, many of them Fortune 500 companies and high profile government agencies.

We’re extremely proud of this. But it didn’t just ‘happen.’

The credit goes to an unusually talented and well-led team of development, sales and support people. They all work directly for Wavecrest; none are outsource or temporary employees. For years these dedicated men and women have made sure that we consistently deliver the products and services that our customers need to meet the many dynamic challenges associated with use of the Internet in the workplace.

And those challenges have certainly evolved over the years. Examples include the very real and seriously increasing risks of productivity losses, bandwidth drains, legal liability, and network security threats. And as the Internet grew and the challenges escalated, we have kept pace every step of the way.

Our first product— a basic software application called ProxyReporter—read and analyzed employers’ outbound Web logs. From that data, it then produced reports that helped management and IT monitor employees’ use of Web access.

Then, as the Internet became more sophisticated, we went on to develop a series of increasingly robust Web-use monitoring and filtering products designed to suit a variety of customers and network infrastructures. Our monitoring products now include Cyfin Reporter—a highly sophisticated and scalable logfile analyzer/reporter—and Cyfin Proxy, a standalone Web proxy/monitor/reporter. Our combination filtering/reporting products include CyBlock for ISA—a combination filter/reporter system for use with Microsoft ISA products—and CyBlock Proxy, a standalone proxy/filter/reporting solution.

Our latest innovation is CyBlock Appliance, a hardware based Internet-usage management device. Designed to monitor and help control use of all Internet protocols, CyBlock Appliance is a standalone proxy, monitor, filter and reporter.

Of particular interest, in recent years, we have upgraded all of these products to deal with emerging issues associated with a variety of Web 2.0 advances such as social networking. At the same time we have been busy incorporating new features such as protocol filtering and trend reporting.

Through the years our products have been well received and proven to be highly reliable and cost-effective, and we back them all with a 90-day money-back guarantee.

As proud as we are of our products, we take equal pride in our support services. When customers call, they talk to a real person—here in America—and they get personalized attention. Our support personnel, all of whom have been with us for years, know that customer satisfaction is key to the company’s (and their own) success. And as a result of their responsiveness and professionalism, they have received literally hundreds of kudos and compliments over the years.

So, in sum, we have much to celebrate and be proud of.

Happy Birthday, Wavecrest!