The Internet was, and still is, one of mankind's greatest achievements. No other medium has been so influential in the pursuit of knowledge and explosion of communication than the good ole World Wide Web. With a little bit of imagination, the right tools and an Internet connection, there is no small tidbit of information that can not located online. When the first sparks of ARPANET came into reality, a tidal wave of digital evolution began; the Internet was born.
Naturally, it was only a matter of time before the first digital pornographic material also became reality; let us be honest, the human civilization thrives on food, water, sunlight and copulation.. and not necessarily in that order..
Now, in the days when the Internet has become such a common part of our household, it's nearly impossible to escape the abundance of porn, illegal software, dubious content and other forms of so-called 'informational material'; provided, of course, one would _wish_ to escape these.
At least one breed of humans, however, is rather determined in their quest to prevent others from accessing all this educational goodness: the admins. It is well known that a rather impressive amount of spyware, viruses and related malware originates from these digital swamps. Most network admins will be quite familiair, for example, with the impressive amount of traffic suddenly originating from a handful of workstations on port 25, only to discover that a short visit to, say, www.insertpornositehere.com by a hapless user has introduced a merry little Trojan into the network. Thankfully, as modern technology has provided us with the means to create these sites, it has also (later on) provided us with the means to block them.
Blocking websites has been a fundamental part of Internet access security for many years now; Internet usage agreements often state that visiting sites of an illicit and/or dubious nature is a rather efficient way to discover exactly how quickly the Human Resource department can shred up your contract. And just to ensure that temptation doesn't get the better of you, hard coded rules exist on many a firewall that will block access to a large number of sites without hesitation.
However, as the Internet becomes more complex and end-users more resourceful, the task of blocking access to unwanted material and sites also increases in difficulty. Thankfully, like the good little firewall we know it to be, Microsoft ISA Server 2004 comes, once again, to our rescue!
In the upcoming series of articles, I will be discussing various methods of blocking access to unwanted material. We shall also be looking at third-party software that may aid us in our undertakings.
In part II of this serie, we shall start with rather standard site filtering, by using available blacklists and, of course, creating our own set of 'undesirable sites'.