SafeSquid – Content Filtering Internet Proxy, has many content filtering features that can be used to decide who is allowed what, when and how much on the net. In this tutorial I will describe how to control access to unwanted categories of websites, by using URL Blacklist database with SafeSquid Proxy Server.
Note: Also see the following articles :
'Deploying A Content Filtering Proxy Server To Distribute Controlled Internet Access With SafeSquid'
Set Up Gateway Level Virus Security With ClamAV And SafeSquid Proxy
How To Set Up Internet Access Control And Internet Filtering With SafeSquid Proxy Server
SafeSquid allows the administrators to use plain text urlblacklist very easily and with a desired level of sophistication. The sites http://www.shallalist.de/ and http://www.urlblacklist.com maintain a well categorized list of various web-sites and pages like porn, adult, webmail, jobsearch, entertainment, etc. This is an excellent resource for an administrator seeking to granularly enforce a corporate policy that allows or disallows only certain kinds of web-sites to be accessible by specific users, groups or networks.
Note: cProfiles offers the flexibility of many more actions than URL Blacklist, instead of just allowing / blocking categories. For example, you can add a profile to a specific category, and then use that profile in any of SafeSquid's filtering sections, for actions on the category like blocking cookies, ads and banners, ActiveX, Java Scripts, throttling bandwidth (QoS), or simply analyzing what category is most visited, without blocking access.
For Details, see http://www.safesquid.com/html/portal.php?page=132
While Shalla Secure Services offer free downloads and updates for home users, Urlblacklist requires you to subscribe to receive updates. You can download the URL Blacklist by Shalla from HERE, and the trial database by urlblacklist.com from HERE.
Please note that you will be able to download this trial database only once. You need to subscribe to urlblacklist.com to be able to receive regular updates
Copy the downloaded trial database to /usr/local/bin directory on the SafeSquid Server, and untar the files
cd /usr/local/src
tar -zxvf bigblacklist.tar.gz
This will create a directory 'blacklist'. Create a directory 'urlbl' in /opt/safesquid and copy the contents of blacklist in this directory.
mkdir /opt/safesquid/urlbl
cd blacklist
cp -rf . /opt/safesquid/urlbl
Next, restart SafeSquid
/etc/init.d/safesquid restart
In SafeSquid GUI Interface, click on URL blacklist in the Top Menu It should display a list of all the categories copied to the urlbl directory. Here, you can query the database to find out if a website is listed under any category. For example, to find out what category hackerstuff.com belongs to, type hackerstuff.com in the Domain field and click on Submit below. You should get a screen similar to this –
Note: This section only allows you to query the database. Selecting or unselecting a category does not enable or disable it.
cProfiles provides the SafeSquid users, the much needed mechanism of classifying web-sites, in one or more categories. Usage is very simple, yet will allow security managers a lot of room, to handle challenges rather inventively.