Blue Coat
More info
- Released
- 1996 (as CacheFlow)
- Type
- Security company
- Owner
- Symantec (2016), later Broadcom
A maker of proxy appliances that began as a web cache and ended up as a censorship tool in the wrong hands.
The company was founded in 1996 as CacheFlow, betting on caching web pages close to users. Once bandwidth got cheap it renamed itself Blue Coat in 2002 and sold control instead: its ProxySG boxes filtered, logged and decrypted traffic for corporations and schools.
The same features work just as well for a government. In 2011 researchers found Blue Coat gear on Syrian networks, where it was used to monitor and censor the internet. Symantec bought the company in 2016 and promptly made Blue Coat's CEO its own. The products later ended up at Broadcom.