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Hi Byran, My company that I work for has installed Barracuda Network web filter to block out certain sites, i.e. weapons, streaming, Youtube, etc. How does the filtering process actually weed out what my company doesn’t want us to view? Thanks,
Dennis Berg
1751 Charm Ct
Rochester Hills, MI 48306
Hi DenniyB,
A web filter or content filter blocks content by checking data against a blacklist in their database and redirecting to an error or “This Page is Blocked” page. The data is compiled of websites (porn, offensive material, entertainment sites etc), offensive words (sexually explicit, obscenities etc) and other data.
This is purely speculation, but if I ran one of these companies I would probably pay a company like AVG Technologies (popular antivirus software) or possibly Google to tap into their database of known bad sites.
In the work place they’re probably more concerned about you goofing around then they are security. So, in most scenarios all the obvious sites will be blocked, Facebook, YouTube etc.
My guess is that some extremely strict companies probably do the reverse where they block ALL websites and then add exceptions of ONLY the sites that they do want you to use.
This is all easy to get around (usually with free proxies), but probably not worth getting fired over. Most people can just mess around on their iPhones anyway. If you’re not already aware I can almost guarantee that all your activities are monitored by a keylogger anyway. You shouldn’t be doing anything personal on a work computer for your own privacy because they will have all your passwords and know the emails you’ve sent, the sites you’ve visited etc.
I worked at a mortgage company once and I was young and naive and I would mess around a lot reading movies reviews and emailing girls etc. Then one day I by chance came across this file and opened it up and it was a log of all this private stuff of another worker that used the computer.
He was bad mouthing the boss and all kinds of stuff and was fired. Safe enough to say, that means they were watching me too. Lucky enough I try not to say anything bad about people especially behind their backs. So this guy definitely diverted all attention away from me. I definitely was careful after that.
Here’s a funny article about the web filtering software you mentioned.
Thanks, Bryan
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