Entensys UserGate Web Filter

Enforce Compliance and Acceptable Use Policy

UserGate Web Filter performs Internet filtering for large and medium business, educational institutions, Internet providers, and public Wi-Fi access points. The solution combines several methods, thereby it guarantees high accuracy, minimal false positives, and compliance with government regulations. In addition, it provides the easy way to comply with CIPA (Children’s Internet Protection Act) and the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) child abuse content list.

Enhanced Internet Security

Protect against dangerous websites, phishing, malware, Trojans, and other threats.

Corporate Policies Enforcement

Enforce granular policies on user activities to prevent their risky behavior.

Monitoring User Internet Activity

Analyze your corporate Internet usage statistics, provide user control, and increase productivity.

Managing Social Media

Control social network use, filter specific messages based on the content.

Product Overview

UserGate Web Filter helps mitigate the risks posed by user Internet browsing by filtering dangerous content, malware, social media, and other web threats. It allows you to monitor user web browsing and optimize bandwidth usage. The product effectively enforces acceptable use policy in order to enable compliance with regulations. UserGate Web Filter provides Deep Content Inspection (DCI) supporting all major languages. In addition, it provides full inspection of HTTPS/SSL web traffic using transparent “trusted man-in-the-middle” (MitM) technology, enforces SSL usage policy, and certifies validity.

How does it work?

UserGate Web Filter combines multiple filtering methods, including high accuracy URL filtering, real-time content analysis, banner and pop-up blocking, safe search, and other methods. Web filtering is performed at the level of DNS and HTTP/HTTPS requests.

The software can function either using its own built-in full-scale proxy server or by receiving filtering requests via an ICAP protocol from any external proxy server or network hub. Solutions can also be developed on virtual machines (VMWare, Virtual Box, etc.) in the form of a virtual image or hardware/software suite.

Features

URL Category-based blocking

UserGate Web Filter uses a massive URL database to classify sites based on 73+ categories. Over 500 million URLs are listed. The database is regularly updated:

The site list is updated daily.

Old listings are re-verified for changes to their content and/or category.

Content filtering based on Deep Content Inspection (DCI) technology

UserGate Web Filter analyzes web pages for specific words and phrases, intelligently supporting the morphology of the most popular languages. This kind of control is applied to specific sections of a site, without blocking the entire site at the category or domain level. This approach is useful for social networks, forums, and other portals with a large share of user-generated content (Web 2.0).

Users can create custom dictionaries for any category or they can subscribe to regularly updated predefined dictionaries (for the Suicide, Terrorism, Pornography, Bad Words, Drugs, and Gambling word sets) in English, German, Russian, Arabic and Japanese languages.

Safe search

Administrators can force use of “safe search” mode on popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) and on YouTube. Inappropriate content is blocked by the sites themselves, which is highly effective for filtering results of image and video searches, among others.

Downloaded content control

UserGate Web Filter uses the antivirus kernels developed by Kaspersky Lab and Avira to scan for viruses both web pages loaded from the Internet and downloaded files. This function provides with additional security and makes web surfing safer.

UserGate Web Filter can also deny downloads of certain file types (EXE, DOC, MP3, AVI etc.). It prevents a user from downloading files which often might contain malware.

White lists and black lists

UserGate Web Filter supports white lists and black lists of URLs. White list/black list entries take precedence over the filtering settings of other mechanisms.

Blocking of banners, pop-ups and spying scripts

Pop-ups are the bane of web surfers: it is all too easy to accidentally click a link in an obnoxious ad image. UserGate Web Filter does away with pop-ups, including ones loaded from other sites. Banner ads are another significant source of annoyance. Visiting a safe site can still force you to view pornographic images in ads on the page margin, for example. UserGate Web Filter solves this problem too, by zapping banner ads before users see them.

UserGate Web Filter protects your privacy by blocking the invisible tracking cookies and plug-ins on many websites and banishing social networks from transmitting data about you after you leave those sites.

Social media control

UserGate Web Filter provides  Web 2.0 applications and social media control, enforcing granular policies on application functions and communications .  Administrators can allow selective access to social media content while restricting non-productive activities.  Granular control of content policies can ensure that employees' social media communications conform to organization's guidelines.

SSL Inspection

Alongside ordinary unencrypted traffic, UserGate Web Filter can be configured to filter HTTPS traffic. The server performs certificate-swapping and morphological filtering on the fly.  UserGate Web Filter uses all of its filtering mechanisms to proceed HTTPS traffic.

Caching

UserGate Web Filter supports caching, so it stores copies of frequently accessed objects, such as documents, images, and articles. Internet users get their information faster, and Internet bandwidth is freed for other tasks.

Monitoring and statistics

UserGate Web Filter offers statistics for visited site categories as well as allowed/blocked hits. These reports make it a cinch to analyze and respond to non-productive web surfing by users.

ICAP (Internet Content Adaptation Protocol) support

UserGate Web Filter can perform filtering at the level of DNS and HTTP requests. When filtering DNS requests, UserGate Web Filter emulates a DNS server with extensive filtering capabilities.  The software can function either using its own built-in full-scale proxy server or by receiving filtering requests via an ICAP protocol from any external proxy server or network hub.  When filtering web traffic, UserGate Web Filter functions as an ICAP server that accepts ICAP client requests for filtering. ICAP clients can include Squid proxy servers, Microsoft ISA servers, Microsoft TMG, Juniper and Cisco hardware, and other products that support ICAP.

RADIUS protocol support

UserGate Web Filter supports a number of RADIUS attributes for device or user authentication.

Transparent proxy mode

UserGate Web Filter can be configured as a transparent proxy. Also the product supports TPROXY mode what makes it significant for telecom and Internet providers networks.

Better performance and Scalability

When working with large number of users it's essential to keep performance and system reliability at top level. UserGate Web Filter has been beta-tested, and therefore optimized, in the largest telecom networks. The solution features various virtual environments support, clastering and virtually unlimited scalability.

It also worth to mention that UserGate Web Filter supports service performance monitoring and also provides recovery in case of any technical failures.