PAN-OS

Create a URL Filtering profile.
If you didn’t already, configure a best practice URL Filtering profile to ensure protection against URLs hosting malware or exploitive content.
Select
Objects
Security Profiles
URL Filtering
and
Add
or modify a URL Filtering profile.
Define site access for each URL category.
Select
Categories
and set the Site Access for each URL category:
allow
traffic destined for that URL category; allowed traffic is not logged.
Select
alert
to have visibility into sites that users are accessing. Traffic matching that category is allowed but a URL filtering log is generated to record when a user accesses a site in that category.
Select
block
to deny access to traffic that matches that category and to enable logging of the blocked traffic.
Select
continue
to display a page to users with a warning and require them to click
Continue
to proceed to a site in that category.
To only allow access if users provide a configured password, select
override
. For more details, see Allow Password Access to Certain Sites.
Configure the URL Filtering profile to detect corporate credential submissions to websites that are in allowed URL categories.
To ensure the best performance and a low false positive rate, the firewall automatically skips checking the credential submissions for any App-ID™ associated with sites that have never been observed hosting malware or phishing content—even if you enable checks in the corresponding category. The list of sites for which the firewall skips credential checking is automatically updated through Applications and Threats content updates.
Select
User Credential Detection
.
Select one of the methods to check for corporate credential submissions to web pages from the
User Credential Detection
drop-down:
Use IP User Mapping
—Checks for valid corporate username submissions and verifies that the username matches the user logged in to the source IP address of the session. The firewall matches the submitted username against its IP address-to-username mapping table. You can use any of the user mapping methods described in Map IP Addresses to Users.
Use Domain Credential Filter
—Checks for valid corporate usernames and password submissions and verifies that the username maps to the IP address of the logged-in user. See Configure Credential Detection with the Windows-based User-ID Agent for instructions on how to set up User-ID to enable this method.
Use Group Mapping
—Checks for valid username submissions based on the user-to-group mapping table populated when you configure the firewall to map users to groups.
With group mapping, you can apply credential detection to
any
part of the directory or to a specific group, such as groups like IT that have access to your most sensitive applications.
This method is prone to false positives in environments that do not have uniquely structured usernames, so you should only use this method to protect your high-value user accounts.
Set the
Valid Username Detected Log Severity
that the firewall uses to log detection of corporate credential submissions (default is medium).
Configure the URL Filtering profile to detect phishing and malicious JavaScript in real-time using local inline categorization.
Allow or block users from submitting corporate credentials to sites based on URL category to prevent credential phishing.
To ensure the best performance and a low false positive rate, the firewall automatically skips checking the credential submissions for any App-ID associated with sites that have never been observed hosting malware or phishing content—even if you enable checks in the corresponding category. The list of sites for which the firewall skips credential checking is automatically updated through Applications and Threats content updates.
For each URL category to which you allow
Site Access
, select how you want to treat
User Credential Submissions
:
alert
—Allow users to submit credentials to the website but generate a URL filtering alert log each time a user submits credentials to sites in this URL category.
allow
(default)—Allow users to submit credentials to the website.
block
—Displays the anti-phishing block page to block users from submitting credentials to the website.
continue
—Present the anti-phishing continue page, which requires users to click
Continue
to access the site.
Configure the URL Filtering profile to detect corporate credential submissions to websites in allowed URL categories.
Define URL category exceptions to specify websites that should always be blocked or allowed, regardless of URL category.
For example, to reduce URL filtering logs, you may want to add your corporate websites to the allow list so that no logs are generated for those sites or, if there is a website that is being overly used and is not work-related, you can add that site to the block list.
The policy actions configured for custom URL categories have priority enforcement over matching URLs in external dynamic lists.
Traffic to websites in the block list is always blocked regardless of the action for the associated category and traffic to URLs in the allow list is always allowed.
For more information on the proper format and wildcard usage, review the URL Category Exception Guidelines.
Enable Safe Search Enforcement.
Log only the page a user visits for URL filtering events.
Select
URL Filtering Settings
and enable
Log container page only
(default) so that the firewall logs only the main page that matches the category, not subsequent pages or categories that load within the container page.
To enable logging for all pages and categories, disable the
Log container page only
option.
Enable HTTP Header Logging for one or more of the supported HTTP header fields.
Select
URL Filtering Settings
and select one or more of the following fields to log:
User-Agent
Referer
X-Forwarded-For
Save the URL Filtering profile.
Click
OK
.
Apply the URL Filtering profile to Security policy rules that allow traffic from clients in the trust zone to the Internet.
Make sure the
Source Zone
in the Security policy rules to which you add URL Filtering profiles is set to a protected internal network.
Select
Policies
Security
. Then, select a Security policy rule to modify.
On the
Actions
tab, edit the Profile Setting.
For
Profile Type
, select
Profiles
. A list of profiles appears.
For
URL Filtering
profile, select the profile you just created.
Click
OK
to save your changes.
Commit
the configuration.
Test your URL filtering configuration.
(
Best Practice
) Enable
Hold client request for category lookup
to block client requests while the firewall performs URL category lookups.
Select
Device
Setup
Content-ID
.
Select
Hold client request for category lookup
.
Commit
your changes.
Set the amount of time, in seconds, before a URL category lookup times out.
Select
Device
Setup
Content-ID
gear icon
.
Enter a number for
Category lookup timeout (sec)
.
Click
OK
.
Commit
your changes.