GFI announced that GFI WebMonitor now includes new security and anti-malware features that enable small and medium-sized businesses to provide employee Internet access without sacrificing network protection.

Combined with GFI WebMonitor’s detection and filtering capabilities, the new security features make it easier for administrators to control Internet access and identify malicious websites and infected content.

With powerful security enhancements – including a new Website Reputation Index and GFI ThreatTrack malicious URL blocking – the latest version of GFI WebMonitor has evolved into one of the industry’s most complete web monitoring, filtering and security solutions.

The Website Reputation Index provides a “safeness” rating for websites based on their current and future threat profiles. Using this feature, administrators can implement flexible Internet access policies by blocking sites based on the risks they pose, rather than preventing access to entire categories of websites, and employees can make smarter decisions about visiting websites with which they are not familiar.

According to a GFI survey, more than 40% of SMBs do not currently have a solution in place that measures the safeness of a given website based on a reputation rating, and 27% say this is a capability they would be interested in.

With ThreatTrack, GFI WebMonitor automatically blacklists hundreds of thousands of websites serving malicious content, including phishing sites and legitimate websites that have been temporarily compromised.

Additional GFI WebMonitor enhancements that enable SMBs to simultaneously ensure a secure and malware-free network infrastructure, prevent cyberslacking and manage bandwidth include:

• Multiple security engines – Utilizes multiple antivirus and other security engines to scan all Internet traffic for malicious content.
• Zero-hour web security – Offers near real-time updates for all security engines to protect against zero-hour threats.
• Streaming media blocking – Enables administrators to block bandwidth-consuming audio and video streaming elements of a website without banning the entire site.
• Instant messaging management – Mitigates risks by blocking a number of messaging clients, including Google Chat, Facebook Chat and other instant messaging portals.
• Soft blocking – Allows administrators to define policies that selectively allow users or groups of users to temporarily override blocking policies after a warning is issued.