SurfControl Web Filter for Juniper Networks Security Devices 5.0.0.237 April 2005

Welcome

Welcome to version 5.0 of SurfControl Web Filter for Windows, Microsoft Proxy Server, and Microsoft ISA Server and SurfControl's Virtual Control Agent™ (VCA). While SurfControl Web Filter is the leading Web filtering product for enterprises of all sizes, this release pays particular attention to the demands of large enterprises.

This release also fixes issues found in earlier versions that affect performance and usability.

SurfControl Web Filter offers the most advanced filtering technology available for the corporate environment, easing the challenge of managing Internet usage in the workplace. It can help you increase employee productivity, optimize network bandwidth, increase security and limit legal liability that occurs when corporations provide Internet access to their employees. Protect your employees and your company by promoting intelligent Internet use.

SurfControl Web Filter offers a complete set of tools for monitoring, filtering and reporting on Internet Access:

The User Monitor and Site Monitor display who is surfing where and for how long.
The Real-Time Monitor shows surfing moment-by-moment as user requests are processed.
The Scheduler handles LiveUpdates to the URL Category List, Network Group Updates and database maintenance.
The Rules Administrator provides an intuitive and easy to use interface for setting up your filtering rules.
SurfControl Report Central includes over 60 charts and tables that graphically show trends and summaries of Internet usage, as well as detailed tables of user activity when you need more detail.
SurfControl's URL Category List is the premier database in the filtering industry, with 47 well organized categories, covering 130 sub-topics, 7 million sites, 1.3 billion pages and international content covering 70 languages and 200 countries.
The VCA dynamically and intelligently categorizes the new sites your users may discover. Using the VCA in conjunction with SurfControl's URL Category List gives you the most comprehensive filtering solution available.

New Features in Version 5.0

SurfControl Report Central

A new web-based reporting engine, making it easier for users throughout the organization to run and schedule the reports they need. SurfControl Report Central also brings faster reporting and a new report showing the how much time a specific user spent at each category.

ISA 2004 Integration

Provides filtering, monitoring and reporting for Microsoft ISA 2004 as well as Microsoft ISA 2000.

Policy Override

The Microsoft ISA integration of SurfControl Web Filter allows a new rule type, Policy Override. Trusted users can be given responsibility to continue to view a page they believe has been incorrectly blocked. This activity is easily identifiable so abuse can be quickly caught.

New URL Database Categories

5 New categories have been added to create 45 categories. These include Spyware, Downloads and Illegal Drugs.

Active Directory Support

Browse your Active Directory tree from the SurfControl Rules Administrator. You can select users and groups from Active Directory for inclusion in your access rules. SurfControl Web Filter continues to support NT Domain and Novell NDS/eDirectory environments.

VLAN Support

Filtering, monitoring and reporting in VLAN environments.

Reduced Data Storage

The option to reduce the amount of information logged and stored, but still capture the relevant activity that you will want to include in reports.

Single Management Console

View, monitor and manage multiple SurfControl servers from a single location.

Faster and more resilient Data Handling

The way logged data is written to your MSDE or SQL database has been re-designed to vastly improve performance and increase resilience to database problems.

Block while categorizing

Pass-by products such as SurfControl Web Filter for Windows have many advantages for your network, such as zero latency and not being a point of failure. One risk is the "sneak peek" which can occur sometimes with any pass-by solution. This is when a user requests a site that is not allowed but is able to see the first page, but not any images. A new "Block while Categorizing" feature has been added that will minimize the risk of this happening.

Track User access by Workstation

Identify if a user accesses the web from different workstations.

Continuous VCA processing

The VCA will now run as a service, continually checking for new, uncategorized sites. In previous releases the VCA was a scheduled task. This new design will improve the turnaround time for the VCA categorization of a site that has never been seen before.

Processing of suspected corrupt flat files:

During a flat file update, any invalid files found will be quarantined in the following created folder:

Program Files\SurfControl\Web Filter\tmp\quarantine

A new command line tool – treatquarantined.exe can then be run which checks these files line by line to see if they correspond to the correct format. Any corrupt lines are left in the original file with clean lines written to a new file in the tmp directory and the corrupt file then deleted from the quarantined folder.

SurfControl strongly recommends that you use the Scheduler to run the treatquarantined.exe command on a daily basis. For more information see Knowledge Base Article 1611 at:

http://kb.surfcontrol.com/display/1/articleDirect/index.asp?aid=1611&r=0.7167627