Online March Madness May Boost Morale at Work but Can Also Pose Risk

As hoops fans and businesses prepare for the March Madness season, Websense, Inc. (NASDAQ: WBSN), a leader in secure Web gateway technology, today reported double-digit increases in the number of sports and gambling Web sites from a year ago, as well as a trend among attackers to use major events like March Madness to spread information-stealing malware through the Web and email.

The quote above from the linked article should be enough to give any IT administrator pause and re-evaluate their web security to make sure it's up to date and blocking malware.

While blocking malware is important there's one other side-effect of March Madness that IT administrators need to fear as well. Whenever there's a major sporting event or any other widely broadcast event, there's a very real possibility that event watchers using their internet links at work will overwhelm the organization's internet link, making it impossible for other employees to get any work done.

In this instance a malware blocking web proxy isn't sufficient, you also need one that has a sophisticated cache engine capable of caching video from the web, so it's only requested once across the WAN link, and distributed from the proxy to anyone in the organization that's requesting that video. The other option of course is just to block access completely, which may have the unintended side-effect of forcing users to tactics like using anonymous proxies to bypass the corporate proxy.