Black Friday, Cyber Monday

With the holiday of Thanksgiving in the United States comes the inevitable day after, known as Black Friday, and the new phenomenon known as Cyber Monday afterwards. Both of these designated days refer of course to the pre-Christmas shopping splurge that occurs right after Thanksgiving.

While Black Friday has had notoriety for some time, Cyber Monday still remains relatively unknown, and may even morph into Cyber Friday or Cyber Week before it becomes truly established. Cyber Monday supposedly reflected when shoppers tired of brick and mortar shopping and turned to their computers the Monday after Black Friday to do their online shopping. According to eBay, shoppers have started their Cyber shopping even earlier than ever this year, starting the days before Thanksgiving when traffic on eBay was up significantly and remained high through Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

What does all of this have to do with the corporate or enterprise proxy? A large part of these purchases and online activity occurs from the corporate network. With the possibility of consumer dollars of course comes the mischievous hackers coming after personal identities, injecting malware and other undesirables onto the corporate network. Cyber Monday remains a good reminder, that it's time to make sure we have a proxy installed for security, and that the URL databases remain up to date, and there's a real time rating system to identify new sites that are threat to the enterprise security.