Blue Coat Denies Its Devices Helping Syrian Gov't

First time accepted submitter drmemnoch writes with a follow-up to a report last week that Internet proxy / filtering / logging devices made by Sunnyvale, CA based Blue Coat Systems have been used by the Syrian government to monitor and censor Syrian's Internet usage. drmemnoch notes that "Sales to restricted countries can often occur through 3rd party resellers. Blue Coat has yet to provide any information other than denial." Specifically, the company denies direct sales, but in the linked ZDnet report kept mum on how third-party resellers might be involved. I requested comment from the company about how their products might have ended up in Syria; Steve Schick of Blue Coat has responded to that request with a more detailed denial (included below) of the company's involvement, and says that there is "no firm evidence" in the logs leaked by Telecomix that Syria has any Blue Coat equipment at all; dissection of that response is invited.

Schick writes: "Blue Coat does not sell to Syria and neither do we provide any kind of technical support, professional services or software maintenance. To our knowledge, we do not have any customers in Syria.

U.S. companies are prohibited from selling to Syria. In addition, we do not allow any of our resellers, regardless of their location in the world, to sell to an embargoed country, such as Syria.

We have seen logs posted that are allegedly from a Blue Coat appliance in use in Syria. From these logs, we see no firm evidence that would determine there is Blue Coat equipment in Syria; in fact, it appears that these logs came from an appliance in a country where there are no trade restrictions. In addition, the log files appear to have come from a third party server that was storing log files uploaded from one of our appliances. The allegation that an organization penetrated one of our appliances through a security hole is flatly not true. There are no known vulnerabilities of our appliance that would allow such an action."