Blue Coat Systems, Inc., was a company that provided hardware, software, and services designed for cybersecurity and network management.

[5] In March 1996, the company was founded as CacheFlow, Inc. in Redmond, Washington by Michael Malcolm, a computer scientist and professor at the University of Waterloo, Joe Pruskowski, and Doug Crow.

[5][7] The company's goal was to develop appliances that would increase website speed by storing frequently accessed web data in the cache.

[14] In mid-1998, during the dot-com bubble, the company made its first sales, earning just $809,000 over three months, and investors started pushing for an initial public offering (IPO).

The review noted that its "most noteworthy features" were its DNS caching and object pipelining techniques, which allowed page data to be delivered in parallel, rather than sequential, streams.

[11] In 1999, board of directors member Andrew Rachleff of Benchmark Capital, an investor, brought in Brian NeSmith, who had just sold his company, Ipsilon Networks, to Nokia for $120 million, as chief executive officer.

[20] Tests by Network World found the Server Accelerator 725 increased website load speed eight-fold.

[23] In May 2000, the company updated CacheFlow OS to cache multimedia content, including RealNetworks' RealSystem, Microsoft's Windows Media and Apple's Quicktime formats.

The appliance sat behind corporate firewalls to filter website traffic for viruses, worms and other harmful software.

It had a range of security features, such as authentication, internet use policies, virus scanning, content filtering, and bandwidth restrictions for streaming video applications.

A review in eWeek said the new ProxySG line was effective and easy to deploy, but the ongoing maintenance fees were expensive.

[44][45] In 2005, the company introduced an anti-spyware appliance called Spyware Interceptor and the following year it announced upcoming WAN optimization products.

[7] In 2006, the company introduced a free web-tool, K9 Web Protection, that can monitor internet traffic, block certain websites, identify phishing scams.

The review said that "you won't find superior WAN traffic management anywhere else," but "the hardware platform could be more up to date considering the price.

[60][61] In August 2011, CEO Michael Borman was fired for failing to meet performance goals and was replaced with Greg Clark.

[94] Blue Coat devices are what is known as a "dual-use" technology, because they can be used both to defend corporate networks and by governments to censor and monitor the public's internet traffic.

[2] In October 2011, the U.S. government examined claims made by Telecomix, a hacktivist group, that Syria was using Blue Coat Systems products for internet censorship.

[100] The company later acknowledged that its systems were being used in Syria, but asserted the equipment was sold to intermediaries in Dubai for use by an Iraqi governmental agency.

[2] Despite the systems consistently sending "heartbeat" pings directly back to Blue Coat, the company claimed not to be monitoring the logs to identify from which country an appliance is communicating.

[2] Blue Coat announced that it would halt providing updates, support and other services for systems operating in Syria.

[2] In April 2013, the Bureau of Industry and Security announced a $2.8 million civil settlement with Computerlinks FZCO, a Dubai reseller, for violations of the Export Administration Regulations related to the transfer to Syria of Blue Coat products.

[2] By 2013, Citizen Lab had published 3 reports regarding the company's devices being found in countries known for using technology to violate human rights.

[96] It identified 61 countries using Blue Coat devices, including those known for censoring and surveilling their citizens' internet activity, such as China, Egypt, Russia, and Venezuela.