Set Up Site Access for URLs on Cloud NGFW for AWS
Table of Contents
Set Up Site Access for URLs on Cloud NGFW for AWS
A URL Filtering security profile protects
against web-based threats, and allows you to tightly control which
web resources your VPC workloads can access.
When traffic
passes through your NGFW to reach a URL, the NGFW allows that traffic
based on the action you set for the category that URL belongs to.
The site access actions you can set are:
- Alert—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.
- Allow—traffic destined for that category is allowed. Additionally, allowed traffic is not logged.
- Block—denies access to traffic that matches that category and enables logging of blocked traffic.
To get the most out of URL filtering in your deployment, you should start by creating allow rules
for the applications you rely on to do business. Then, review the URL categories
that classify malicious and exploitive content—we recommend that you block these
outright.
When deploying URL filtering for the first time, we recommend that you start with a basic setup
that gives us visibility into web activity patterns while blocking confirmed
malicious content. You can begin by blocking categories that are known to be
malicious—malware, command and control, and phishing. For other categories, set them
to alert to get visibility into the sites your users are accessing. Then you can
decide what you want to allow, limit, and block.
Alerting
on all web activity generates a large number of log files, so you
might want to do this initially and then modify your site access
actions to better suit your needs.
Complete the following
steps to set site access for custom and pre-defined URL categories.
- Select Rulestacks and select a previously-created rulestack on which to configure URL filtering.Select .Select category or categories from the displayed list.Set Site Access for the selected categories from the drop-down.Click Save.
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