Messaging

Filtering for Enterprise Customers

An application from webwasher, the German company once known for its ad-blocking software, is designed to provide comprehensive Internet protection for an ISP's enterprise customers.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [April 17, 2003]

webwasher, a German Internet company, became well known for its simple software that blocked banner ads. The software is spelled WebWasher to distinguish it from the company, webwasher. The product, updated as recently as December, 2002, is currently subject to benign neglect as the company focuses on enterprise Internet protection, which includes anti-spam services.

Founded with $3 million in funding on October 6, 1999, as a spinoff of German technology behemoth Siemens, the company has had to do a lot of development on what was, at the time, a small budget.

Since its first product, however, the company has developed full-fledged Internet protection solutions that provide a full suite of services to enterprises, including content filtering, anti-virus, anti-spam, access management. The company also provides real-time and long term data reporting to help administrators track the performance of the product and monitor the performance of Web and e-mail services.

Frank Berzau, webwasher director of business development, says that the ISP business is ready for a comprehensive solution. "We see a trend. Basic dialup service is not competitive anymore. ISPs, such as Hotmail and AT&T, are offering outsourced or hosted anti-virus and anti-spam."

The product can use LDAP or a similar protocol to delegate rights and privileges. "Using LDAP," says Berzau, "we can map an IP address range to a user name, delegate administration rights to a profile, and allow a corporate customer to manage preferences (which we call "details")."

WebWasher software can be installed on a server using Windows, Linux, or Solaris. The software supports the ICAP protocol. That makes it compatible with many caching vendors, says Berzau. "We have an OEM agreement with Network Appliance and could work with any other appliance that supports ICAP."

For example, one of the company's smaller ISP customers uses Linux and Squid—although ICAP support is not built into Squid, there is a patch available.

Berzau says that a key feature of WebWasher is that all features are in one application. "WebWasher is unique," he says, "because it has integrated all the features into a single binary. You can install it and offer anti-virus services now and then, later, pay for a license key for anti-spam services. This has a big impact on ROI—maintenance is limited to obtaining a license key."

The full Content Security Management (CSM) Suite includes:

Internet access management—Three product features (the company's DynaBLocator, Real-Time Classifier, and a user-defined Extended List) work together to enforce corporate use policies. The company claims it has "the most sophisticated URL filter in existence" and supports 58 content categories, making content management "granular but mangeable."

Internet content filtering—The software blocks pop-up ads, applets, and flash animations, and it protects users from cookies, Web bugs, and referrers, including invisible Web content. The goal is to lower the potential of the Web to distract employees.

E-mail filtering—The software enforces corporate policies by monitoring the content of both inbound and outbound messages.

Spam filtering—The software uses a variety of anti-spam methods working together to outperform any lone solution or even "chains" of solutions. The key, the company notes, is to coordinate different anti-spam methods. The coordinated solution is called SpamEquator. SpamEquator recently announced plans to assimilate Mailshell's SpamCatcher software into its SpamEquator. Users can supplement the technology by building custom rule sets.

Anti-virus—WebWasher uses a combination of anti-virus products including Computer Associate's eTrust and McAfee's anti-virus engine. It increases the efficiency of anti-virus software by subjecting traffic to a pre-scan to determine the content type of the traffic. In addition to increasing efficiency, the pre-scan means that the software will not be fooled by incorrect extension names, which have been used to spread viruses recently. WebWasher supplements all of this with its own pattern recognition anti-virus technology.

Reporting—WebWasher's Live Reporting product allows users to view pre-generated information displays in real-time. Because the software generates charts based on a wide variety of data combinations, the GUI appears to customize the data for the end user. WebWasher also provides ContentReporter, a data analysis tool purchased from Network Appliance (along with source code and rights). Berzau says that ContentReporter produces the same data as the competition—but can handle much larger volumes. He claims that one customer is using it to analyze at least 10 GB of daily logs. The product imports log files into an Oracle or SQL database, generates reports based on queries, and distributes the data by e-mail or over the Web. As with other elements of WebWasher, the ISP can assign administration rights through the LDAP directory.

Pricing and availability
The product is available now from webwasher and its affiliates. As no partners (besides Network Appliance) outside of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria were public at press time, most buyers should contact webwasher directly through this form.

Pricing was not available at press time. The product is priced on a per user basis. Most elements of WebWasher are priced on a one time fee basis, but the anti-virus and anti-spam features, which are updated constantly, are priced on a per user per month basis.

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