Sophos PLC has released a Web filtering appliance for business users, one of several vendors adding the technology to their security product lineup. The WS1000 appliance, which sits at the gateway, is designed to stop users from infecting their computers with harmful programs as a result of Web surfing, said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. The WS1000 has several features to control Web traffic. It can block Web sites that administrators don’t want users to view, and it also scans Web sites for malicious code as users visit Web pages. The appliance checks against a database of Web sites to see if a site has been flagged for malicious activity. The company scans the Web for sites that look suspicious and they are added to the database every five minutes, Cluley said. The appliance is available now, priced at CDN$6,219.