McAfee SmartFilter

McAfee SmartFilter Overview:

Today’s dynamic Web 2.0 environment poses significant security challenges for the enterprise. Take charge of security in your organization with smart web filtering that helps prevent exposure to viruses, malware, and other security risks, while reducing your legal liability, maximizing employee productivity, and preserving bandwidth for business-related activities.

Description:

McAfee SmartFilter is the intelligent web filtering software solution designed to prevent your employees from accessing sites that expose your organization to viruses, malware, and other security risks, while reducing legal liability, maximizing employee productivity, and preserving bandwidth for business-related activities.

SmartFilter delivers:

Industry-leading protection — Puts an end to malicious code and web-borne viruses that can enter the network when users unknowingly visit infected websites. SmartFilter uses McAfee TrustedSource Global Threat Intelligence technology to proactively block traffic to sources that may pose a security risk.

Reduced risk and increased productivity — Filters and monitors Internet use to control outbound web access and protect against web-based threats. SmartFilter helps you reduce legal liability, increase employee productivity, and preserve bandwidth for productive work.

Full flexibility — Includes predefined filtering policies for over 35 million blockable websites in more than 90 categories. Customize (add categories, create block/allow lists, exempt certain URLs, and more) as needed.

TrustedSource™ technology proactively finds, reports, and enables SmartFilter to block traffic to and from questionable sources. Relying on its global reputation network and knowledge of Internet entities, TrustedSource identifies potentially malicious behavior, including actions that indicate an intention to distribute malicious code.

For category-based filtering, the TrustedSource Web Database provides a proven repository of more than 25 million blockable websites in more than 90 categories. Built by a team of multilingual web analysts using state-of-the-art technology, our TrustedSource Web Database offers unmatched coverage, quality, and accuracy.

Benefits and Features:

SmartFilter Solutions:

The Smart Web Filtering Solution from McAfee

Your employees are your company’s most important asset. The Internet is probably close behind, giving your employees essential tools to do their jobs while giving partners and customers a convenient way to connect with you. But for too many companies, employees + Internet = risks. Put an end to those risks with McAfee SmartFilter®. It’s the smart web filtering solution designed to prevent exposure to viruses, malware, and other security risks, while reducing legal liability, maximizing employee productivity, and preserving bandwidth for business-related activities.

The web you want. The control you need.
Today’s dynamic Web 2.0 environment poses significant security challenges for the enterprise. Malicious code and web-borne viruses can enter the network when users visit an infected website—usually without even knowing it. And the growing use of blogs, wikis, social networking sites, and other interactive features of Web 2.0 also poses an ever-increasing threat. The good news is that you don’t have to put up with these threats. You can take charge of security the smart way, even in a Web 2.0 world.

McAfee SmartFilter enables your organization to understand, filter, and monitor Internet use, while providing effective control over outbound web access and protection against the web-based threats you’re likely to encounter, today and tomorrow. The McAfee SmartFilter product line includes solutions optimized for business and for education.

Powered by TrustedSource
McAfee SmartFilter incorporates global intelligence from our industry-leading TrustedSource™ reputation system, enabling your company to benefit from information about content sources and risks gathered across the entire Internet. In the same way a credit agency provides credit scores to enable reliable commerce, TrustedSource provides reputation scores for URLs, domains, and IP addresses based on known behaviors, deviations from expected behaviors, and dynamic assessment of security risks. Using this real-time scoring, McAfee SmartFilter proactively and reliably detects and blocks spyware, phishing, malware, and other security threats that are ubiquitous in today’s Web 2.0 environment.

Reputation-based filtering + category-based filtering = the best protection available
McAfee SmartFilter delivers the best protection available through the powerful combination of reputation-based and category-based filtering powered by our TrustedSource Web Database.

• TrustedSource technology proactively finds, reports, and enables McAfee SmartFilter to block traffic to and from questionable sources. Relying on its global reputation network and knowledge of Internet entities, TrustedSource identifies potentially malicious behavior, including actions that indicate an intention to distribute malicious code.
   
• The TrustedSource Web Database enables McAfee SmartFilter to deliver the best protection available through the powerful combination of both reputation- and category-based filtering. The database is a repository for all of the Internet reputation data gathered by McAfee solutions deployed around the globe. TrustedSource uses this rich data source to determine reputation scores and category placement for use by McAfee SmartFilter.
   
• For category-based filtering, the TrustedSource Web Database provides a proven repository of over 25 million websites that can be blocked in over 90 categories. Built by a team of multi-lingual web analysts using state-of-the-art technology, the TrustedSource Web Database offers unmatched coverage, quality, and accuracy. Your purchase of McAfee SmartFilter includes comprehensive coverage of all our categories, with no premium charges or additional costs.

Understanding your organization’s web usage with our powerful reporting solution
McAfee SmartFilter products include powerful reporting capabilities—an element that’s essential to the utility of any web filtering solution. With McAfee Web Reporter, you can quickly understand how your organization is using the web, identify trends, isolate problems, document inappropriate web activity, and tailor your filtering settings to effectively enforce your web usage policies.

McAfee Web Reporter combines real-time views into today’s web traffic, extensive drill-down capabilities, and powerful off-line processing—providing everything you need in one easy-to-use solution.

It’s available in two versions: McAfee Web Reporter, Basic and McAfee Web Reporter Premium, Gateway Edition, so you can choose the features and scalability best suited to your organization’s needs. The basic version offers very robust reporting capabilities and is available for no charge with McAfee SmartFilter. The premium version offers additional capabilities, including:

• Delegated Reporting: You can reduce the burden on IT administrators by distributing reporting responsibilities across the organization, allowing or restricting access to specific data as appropriate for each authorized user.
   
• Advanced Reporting: Powerful advanced reporting capabilities enable you to configure highly detailed, custom reports to help identify trends and issues. You can even combine multiple queries into a single report or dashboard view to get detailed reporting results tailored to your needs.

Quick View immediately displays actionable data each time you open McAfee Web Reporter,
without the need to run a report. You can see additional data by simply clicking on an active link.

Advanced reporting capabilities provide all the detail and flexibility you need to
understand your organization’s web traffic. You can even combine multiple graphs and
tables from different queries in a single report or dashboard view.

Easy to manage
The intuitive interface lets you pick and choose the categories you wish to implement, and customize your policies according to users and groups you specify. For example, you can deny access to gambling and pornography sites for your entire organization, while allowing access to travel or sports sites to certain departments or users during lunch hours. With Authorized Override, you can designate individual users who are authorized via password to override the filter for a specified time. You can also easily create user-defined categories that allow you to block sites not included in the TrustedSource Web Database, or to exempt any site that you would like specific groups or individuals to access.

McAfee SmartFilter products give you the flexibility you want and control you need to manage your individual web access policy.

An intuitive graphical user interface makes policy creation in McAfee fast and easy.

Deploy a filtering solution that fits directly into your network architecture
McAfee SmartFilter products fit seamlessly into almost any network environment. With over 30 supported platforms, they offer the widest range of deployment options to match your exact needs.

Many McAfee SmartFilter configurations are embedded into a host platform and run on-box with the most popular proxy servers, caching appliances, and firewalls—providing unrivaled speed, reliability, scalability, and savings since no additional hardware is required. In fact, McAfee SmartFilter is the leading on-box OEM choice with partners (see sidebar, “Supported McAfee and Partner Platforms”).

Additionally, McAfee SmartFilter is available as an on-box component of McAfee Firewall Enterprise (Sidewinder), and the TrustedSource Web Database is used by McAfee Web Gateway (formerly Webwasher). With McAfee Web Gateway, you’ll find a complete portfolio of gateway web security appliances designed to protect enterprises from malware, data leakage, and Internet misuse, while ensuring policy enforcement, regulatory compliance, and a productive application environment. And with McAfee Firewall Enterprise, you’ll find next generation firewall solutions that combine multi-layer security, Global Threat Intelligence, and application visibility and control for unparalleled protection.

McAfee SmartFilter products also run off-box, providing additional flexibility and deployment options with minimal impact on your network. McAfee offers two options for off-box deployments: an in-line option that works with your web proxy, cache, or firewall via the Internet Filtering Protocol (IFP), and a pass-by option called McAfee SmartFilter–Web Inspector. Using Web Inspector, you can set up McAfee SmartFilter to passively monitor and filter all HTTP and HTTPS web traffic generated from within the network. This setup requires minimal changes to your existing network infrastructure, with no need to integrate a third-party web proxy, web cache, or firewall.

This diagram represents typical configurations for McAfee SmartFilter products. Other configurations are possible.

 

System Requirements:

These are minimum system requirements. Actual requirements will vary depending on the nature of your environment.

McAfee SmartFilter and SmartFilter, Education Edition

Supported operating systems

• Microsoft Windows Vista
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional
• Microsoft Windows 2003
• Microsoft Windows 2000
• Solaris 10, 9, 8
• Red Hat ES 5.1, 5, 4, 3

Supported platforms

• Check Point Firewall-1
• Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances
• Cisco Catalyst Switches
• Cisco Content Engine
• Cisco Integrated Service Routers
• Cisco PIX Firewall
• Cisco Routers/IOS Firewall
• Microsoft ISA Server 2006, 2004, 2000
• Nortel ACC
• Nortel ASF
• Novell Border Manager
• SonicWALL
• Squid Proxy Server
• Stratacache
• Sun Java System Web Server
• 3Com SuperStack 3

McAfee SmartFilter—Web Inspector

Supported operating systems

• Microsoft Windows XP Professional
• Microsoft Windows 2003
• Microsoft Windows 2000

Partial List of Supported OEM Partners

• Astaro
• Bascom
• Blue Coat
• Brightfilter
• Check Point
• Computer Associates
• Detica
• FaceTime
• Internetsafety.com
• M86
• Purewire
• Webroot
• Wedgenetworks

Documentation:

Download the McAfee SmartFilter Datasheet (PDF).