Web encryption is indispensable for today's businesses, but organizations with an open port 443 (HTTPS tunnel) on their firewall are left with a major security hole wide open in their networks. Traditional firewalls and gateway anti-virus solutions are unable to scan encrypted traffic, and therefore can provide no control over what content is sent in and out of organizations' networks via HTTPS. This presents risks to organizations that may not realize they cannot rely on their HTTP filters to protect HTTPS encrypted traffic against malicious content.

This white paper discusses how HTTPS filtering (SSL scanning) from Secure Computing provides companies with the means to counter these threats by fully extending their Internet usage policies to HTTPS traffic, and thereby proactively closing that last known major network security hole.