The market maturation of security technology typically follows four phases: security technology is adopted for a real but minor threat, threats reach a critical mass, vendors get active in counter-threat technology and customer adoption accelerates. That’s pretty much the state of Web filtering, which has languished in the shadows of its more popular cousins, firewalls and antivirus. But that’s beginning to change as the increasing number of threats in active Web content is driving the need for better content inspection and filtering technology.

Web filtering has evolved from blacklisting and blocking known sets of URLs to content security that inspects and protects against threats embedded in Web traffic and electronic messages. It’s the amalgamation of email security with improved abilities to look at active threats coming over Port 80 as much as Port 25.

At a meeting of the CompTIA IT Security Executive Forum in Los Angeles yesterday, MX Logic (McAfee) founder Scott Chasin called Web and content filtering one of the best untapped security opportunities for solution providers. The vendor activity in Web filtering has been tremendous in the last month alone, marking a trend that this technology is becoming a critical component of the security paradigm. Here’s a look at some of the activity in the content filtering arena.

Cisco Buys ScanSafe
Cisco’s acquisition of ScanSafe—a privately held security service provider—adds a number of security capabilities to the networking giant’s already impressive security portfolio. Among ScanSafe’s primary specialties is content filtering. The acquisition signals that content and cloud-based security services are not only important to Cisco, but a legitimate market.

WatchGuard Gets into Content Filtering
WatchGuard continues to rebuild from its glory days, and the latest effort is a line of extensible content security solutions specifically designed for small to medium sized businesses. The new appliances include e-mail security suite, which provides advanced protection against spam, phishing, viruses, malware and other forms of e-mail based threats.

Webroot Keeps Growing
Born as an antispyware software company, Webroot continues to evolve and transform itself into a software services company. The company says its winning more share from the missteps by Postini (Google) and Symantec (MessageLabs). Expect to see Webroot make a major push into the channel to accelerate its already impressive 150 year-over-year security services growth.

McAfee Buys MX Logic
McAfee’s acquisition of MX Logic, a channel-centric leader in security services, was a pretty strong indication of the anticipated growth in demand for this technology as a service. MX Logic gives McAfee an instant foothold in security services to compete against the likes of Symantec, Postini and—now—Cisco.

SonicWall Unveils Hybrid
SonicWall continues to add functionality and capability to its security appliances, and over the summer released a hybrid email and content security system that combines the capabilities of an on-premise appliance with the power of cloud-based updates and protection. Like other vendors cloud-based offerings, SonicWall’s approach leverages the cloud for both intelligence correlation and scalable response to new threats.

As active threats becoming increasingly potent and prevalent, the need for content security - both for messaging as well as embedded media in Web traffic - will increase. The flurry of vendor activity in this technology and service delivery is a harbinger of security threats and opportunities to come. Soon, content security will evolve from a “nice to have” to a “must have” technology.