It is getting harder to tell the good guys from the bad these days. Life up to about last year used to be so simple. There were white hat networkers and black hat networkers. The white hats are the ones who try to gain entry into your network with your permission, to stress test your security and pinpoint vulnerabilities. The black hats are mostly the bad guys. But now we have grey hat networks, the ones that aren’t so easy to characterize as evildoers.

I guess this mirrors life, where nothing is black and white anymore (at least outside the perspective of our own president, but don’t get me started on that). These grey networks are becoming more common as corporate IT staffs do their best to stem the tide of peer-to-peer, instant messaging, and other incidental applications that have become mission critical to some of their users. The reason they are called grey is because while they are still far from the accepted corporate standard portfolio of “approved” applications, they are useful and in common use across the corporate network.

Actually, the problem is not new. You can read more about it here.