topic Blocking Blogs and Forums "Manually" in Web Security

Blocking Blogs and Forums "Manually"

dingall — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:22:39 GMT

Sorry about the title - couldn't think of a clever way of saying this!!

We have recently replaced our outdated proxy and filtering solution with a pair of IronPort appliances and are generally pleased with them.

However, one thing that has come up on a few occassions is that, even though the category Blogs & Forums is blocked for most users, there are still a large number of Blog/Forum sites that people can get to.

I understand that a URL category filter couldn't possibly cover every site, especially given the speed at which new ones appear.

What I'm wondering is if anyone has had any success with blocking these sites using a Custom URL Category with a keyword filter. My idea is that this keyword filter could look for "/blog", "/forum" etc. within a URL and then block it based on the assumption that it is a blog or forum.

If anyone has done something like this and is wiliing to share details of how they did it I would greatly appreciate it! 😄

Re: Blocking Blogs and Forums "Manually"

jowolfer — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:05:05 GMT

dangerousd,

You can definitely block based on regex keyword. I'm not sure how effective this would really be though.

Are you able to verify if the blog and forum pages not categorized contain the work 'blog' or 'forum' somewhere in the URL?

You could certain try this with little overhead (assuming the regex doesn't contain a .*) and then grep the access logs to verify what is hitting this new category.

Re: Blocking Blogs and Forums "Manually"

dingall — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:50:43 GMT

Thanks Josh. We had someone from IronPort on site a few days ago to provide some training. He agreed with what you said, so I may give that a go at some point.

A lot of the sites we've found which contain blogs that aren't being blocked by IronPort do have obvious keywords in the URL somewhere - most commonly www.site.com/blog or blog.site.com - or something along those lines.