Surf Protection (URL/Content Filtering)

Administrators use Astaro's Surf Protection (URL/Content Filtering) to specify the types of web sites that are inappropriate for groups of users in their organizations.

As users request web pages, the software checks a database of over 20 million web addresses and either records or blocks access to inappropriate sites.

Flexible Policy Creation
Astaro's Surf Protection lets administrators define web access policies quickly and precisely. A point-and-click web interface makes it easy to define profiles of inappropriate web sites from among 58 categories.

Administrators can tailor profiles for their organization by aggregating the categories into 18 customizable groups and by creating whitelists and blacklists of web sites that should be accessible or blocked.

Comprehensive Coverage
Astaro's Surf Protection utilizes a database of 20 million categorized web sites maintained by Cobion. This is the largest database available for any commercial URL filtering system.Web pages are analyzed using sophisticated classification techniques such as:

• Text Classification. Web pages are rated using factors such as the frequency of word occurrences and word combinations.

• Optical Character Recognition. Text on images is captured and analyzed.

• Visual Object Recognition. Symbols, logos, and trademarks are used to categorize web sites.

• Porn Detection. Flesh tone images and face recognition are used to identify pictures with high concentrations of non-facial flesh.

• Similarity Comparison. Images are compared with similar images from already classified web sites.

The database classifies web pages in 15 languages.

If a user requests a web page that is not included in the database, the URL is sent to the web crawlers and classified within 24 hours.

Detailed Reporting
Astaro's Surf Protection provides detailed reporting of web traffic and denial incidents. Administrators can use these capabilities to understand user behavior, prioritize problems, and determine appropriate web use policies.

Excellent Performance
To ensure excellent performance: 

• Astaro's spam filter caches URLs that have previously been requested in a local database, so the master database is referenced only for URLs never before accessed from that site.

• Web page classifications can be quickly retrieved from seven servers around the globe, the most locations of any commercial URL filtering system.