Blue Coat WebPulse Now Analyzes More Than 150 Million Web Requests Daily to Protect Against Web-based Threats

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Blue Coat Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:BCSI), the leader in WAN Application Delivery and Secure Web Gateway, today announced that its cloud-based security service Blue Coat^® WebPulse^® has reached a new milestone, analyzing more than 150 million Web requests per day, a 50 percent increase in less than six months. The WebPulse service is a critical component of a multi-layered defense and ensures that Blue Coat^® WebFilter^®, K9 and ProxyClient recognize the most relevant URLs to more effectively protect customers from new sources of malicious threats.

With more than 150 million Web requests per day, the WebPulse service categorizes a wide range of Web content to better understand the new sources and behavior of malware, Trojans, botnets, active scripts and phishing attacks, returning ratings in an average of 100 milliseconds worldwide. The volume and repetition of Web requests into the WebPulse service ensure that popular and trusted Websites, which are increasingly the target of injection attacks, are constantly reassessed to verify their safety.

This continual reassessment is critical to combating the growing prevalence of Web-based attacks, which have tripled since 2007. According to Blue Coat’s database ratings, malware sources have increased 89 percent in the first eight months of 2008 over 2007. Sophos also estimates that a new Web page is infected every five seconds. Of those infected pages, 90 percent are legitimate.

“The Blue Coat WebPulse service leverages the power of cloud computing to analyze more than 150 million Web requests a day to create a community in which the discovery of malware by one member is shared with all,” said Bethany Mayer, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing at Blue Coat Systems. “By maintaining a timely profile of Web content as a consequence of the sheer volume of requests, WebPulse provides customers with an important new layer of security at their Internet gateway.”

As a cloud-based security service, the WebPulse service creates a community that reviews more Web content and utilizes more defenses than a single organization could cost effectively manage. The WebPulse service provides enterprises and consumers with a real-time rating service to analyze newly published or previously unrated Web content. The service also includes a background rating process that utilizes multiple threat detection engines, machine analysis of Web content and human raters.

To gain a comprehensive profile of Web content, the WebPulse service analyzes requests from a wide range of sources, including Blue Coat WebFilter customers, users of ProxyClient and K9 Web Protection, the company’s free Web-based security service for families and individuals, and as many as 100 million customers of mobile operators and fixed-line service providers that use Blue Coat appliances within their networks. With both consumers and enterprises feeding Web requests into the WebPulse service, it analyzes both popular consumer sites as well as business-relevant sites to better protect the user.

When the WebPulse service detects malware, the identity of the host is sent to the Blue Coat WebFilter master database. The service also identifies malware “call-home” requests and adds those to the list of sites that WebFilter blocks. Blue Coat^® ProxySG^® appliances check for threat updates every five minutes to update ‘on-proxy’ WebFilter databases while remote clients receive updates immediately.

At the enterprise level, the WebPulse service also offloads the Web gateway from analyzing all web content and efficiently blocks dynamic web requests to malware hosts hidden in popular and trusted web sites.

Blue Coat provides the WebPulse service and its content rating power to its WebFilter, K9 and ProxyClient users at no additional cost.

In addition to WebPulse and WebFilter, Blue Coat provides inline threat detection for downloads and Webmail attachments through the use of its ProxyAV^tm appliance. Blue Coat ProxySG appliances enable organizations to implement policy controls, block downloads from suspicious or unrated sites, inspect SSL traffic and detect masquerading files. This layered defense allows enterprises to better protect against diverse threats to their corporate networks.

About Blue Coat Systems

Blue Coat secures Web communications and accelerates business applications across the distributed enterprise. Blue Coat’s family of appliances and client-based solutions – deployed in branch offices, Internet gateways, end points, and data centers – provide intelligent points of policy-based control enabling IT organizations to optimize security and accelerate performance between users and applications. Blue Coat has installed more than 40,000 appliances worldwide. Blue Coat is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and can be reached at (408) 220-2200 or www.bluecoat.com.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS: The statements contained in this press release that are not purely historical are forward-looking statements, including statements regarding Blue Coat Systems’ expectations, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future, and including statements regarding the capabilities and expected performance of Blue Coat Systems’ products. All forward-looking statements included in this press release are based upon information available to Blue Coat Systems as of the date hereof, and Blue Coat Systems assumes no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These and other risks relating to Blue Coat Systems’ business are set forth in Blue Coat Systems’ Form 10-Q for the quarter ended July 31, 2008 and Form 10-K for the year ended April 30, 2008, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Blue Coat, ProxySG and the Blue Coat logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Blue Coat Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and certain other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.