US Patent 7136359 Method and apparatus for transparently proxying a connection

A system and method are disclosed for transparently proxying a connection to a protected machine. The method includes monitoring a communication packet on a network at a proxy machine. The communication packet has a communication packet source address, source port number, destination address, and destination port number. The proxy determines whether to intercept the communication packet based on whether the communication packet destination address and the communication packet destination port number correspond to a protected destination address and a protected destination port number stored in a proxy list. The proxy machine then determines whether to proxy a proxied connection associated with the communication packet based on the communication packet source address and the communication packet source port number. A protected connection is terminated from the proxy machine to a protected machine. The protected machine corresponds to the communication packet destination address and the communication packet destination port number.