Protect Your Web Browsing Using Secure Computing Web Protection Service

Learn how to use Secure Computing's Secure Web Protection service offers a proxy server to protect both malware and not-worksafe Web sites. It is a simple and unbotrusiveway to protect your browsing. It isn't useful for protecting Web servers from inbound attacks, for example, and shouldn't substitute for a fully-featured intrusion appliance, but it can protect individuals and small networks especially with a lot of home-based and remote office users.

Video Transcription

Hello and welcome to another edition of Web informant.tv. I am David Strom, your host and reviewer. Today, we look at secure computing, secure web protection service, a combination of web proxy filtering and malware protection that can be easily be deployed from a single PC to an entire enterprise. There are two parts to the service, first is making changes to either to your network or to your desktop PC to uses web proxy. And second are configuring the online service itself. To set up a proxy server, you have three choices, you can redirect all web traffic from your firewall, deploy changes to the browser settings on each desktop with desktop delivery software or do it manually. Here, we choose internet options, connection, LAN settings and then we enter the address that the proxy server or use the automatic proxy configuration PAC script file location that is shown on our screen. The next step is to setup policies in protected network, IP address ranges with the product calls net blocks. To create a new policy, use your browser to login to the service, go to the policy manager and you edit the sample policy that we are showing here. You can see the various content categories including porn, gambling, fraudulent and whether to allow block or warn when you click on the pencil icon to edit the parameters. You can also set rules for particular times of day and whether you want to apply the trusted source reputation score to the URL, along with sending an email alert to the administrator. You can also set your own custom category using the list on the right hand side of the screen and clicking on the plus sign to add your own. You can turn on save search automatically when looking for images in most search engines including all the major once like Google, Yahoo and MSN. This will filter out objection image search results that showed nudity and other things not safe for work. At the bottom of business policy configuration, you want to make sure you can check the enforced safe search box that we show here. Your next step is to include the IP address range that the proxy service will cover. Go to the add main tab at the top and then click manage users and net blocks and you will see a list of both of those things here. If you are using a PC for a network you want to protect, this service will show you the IP address that you need to add to the net block. Just click on the Add Net Block button, assign the IP range to that particular group. You can have different groups of policies for guest workers or branch offices for example. You save your changes when you are done. Now you can go to the main dash board, get a real time view, your web browsing activity including sites that has suspicious pages, malware and overall bandwidth that is consumed by your web traffic. You can mouse over the charts to get more specific information. Let us show you what happens when going to unknown malware site. In this case, the ICAR Test site, we go there and you will see that we are trying to download the virus. You can also click on the policy’s page and see how much bandwidth you save with blocking these bad sites. So what do I like about the service? First is the price, less than 5 bucks a month per use if you subscribe to both malware and filtering services. Second, enforcing safe search is great and let me demonstrate. We will search for Tommy Guns without the service and you can see the results here. Now, we will show you what happens when you use the service, you will see the notice that we have in the header that a strict safe search is on and we get mostly pictures of toys. We go into our Google options, you will see that the service has overwritten the settings. Of course, you could just use another search engine but the point here is that the service can protect you from unintentionally going to bad places on the web. I also like that the policies can match particular groups of users or situations and that you as the IT administrator can rely on secure computing to automatically update the list of banned sites and malware URLs as well as ad