Blue Coat Systems, a market leader in enterprise security, Wednesday announced it has added seven new partners to the Blue Coat Encrypted Traffic Management (ETM) Ready Program, bringing the total number of partners to 17. The new members include major security companies such as HP, Gigamon, Symantec, Trend Micro and RSA.
This group of leading security vendors forms an industry collaboration to help customers expose and combat threats hiding in encrypted traffic while also protecting privacy and ensuring compliance.
Today, the number of both business and consumer websites using SSL encryption as the default for securing all data in transit continue to grow. According to Blue Coat Labs research, of the top 10 most visited web sites, 100 percent of them use HTTPS, or encrypted traffic, rendering 100 percent of that traffic invisible to all security devices unless it is decrypted.
The growing use of encryption to address privacy concerns is creating a perfect set of conditions for cyber criminals to hide malware inside encrypted transactions. In fact, Blue Coat said that its researchers have found that it often reduces the level of sophistication required for malware to avoid detection; thereby making it easier for malware to get onto the network. The Blue Coat researchers found that over a typical seven-day period, out of 1.1 million new sites identified and classified, over 40,000 requests were newly-classified malicious HTTPS sites and 100,000 requests (approximately 10 percent) Command-and-Control HTTPS sites were already infected.
Peter Doggart, vice president of business development for Blue Coat
Encryption is the tool of choice to protect privacy. But it is also quickly becoming yet another method of attack across the threat landscape.
