New Firewall Filter

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johnshaw
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New Firewall Filter

#1

Post by johnshaw »

I noticed today that a new firewall filter is being implemented What is being done? What is the plan?. Is there information out there for us to know ahead of time what impact will be seen in our wards and stakes? How can I help our technology specialists be prepared for potential issues?
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
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Biggles
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Re: New Firewall Filter

#2

Post by Biggles »

The notification on the relevant page staes that STS's will be notified!
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sj3vans
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Re: New Firewall Filter

#3

Post by sj3vans »

I am a STS but haven't seen anything on this myself. Although, I've been on vacation this past week and may have missed it? I did hear that there was a big issue with the 881's getting some kind of change midweek which caused havoc but they got it fixed quickly apparently. I checked ours prior to conf and everything is fine.
lajackson
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Re: New Firewall Filter

#4

Post by lajackson »

sj3vans wrote:I did hear that there was a big issue with the 881's getting some kind of change midweek which caused havoc but they got it fixed quickly apparently.
And it appears they did it before we noticed anything at all had happened, if it did.
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johnshaw
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Re: New Firewall Filter

#5

Post by johnshaw »

What impact will we see if any, what anticipated questions will I, as the STS, need to answer? What is the impact to relevant Facilities Zones, User Zones, Mission, CES only implementations. What about Family History Centers? If we identify and issue what is our course of action? There are hundreds of us ready to be useful.

Is there selective Youtube Access? Does this help with the firewall issue related to streaming, etc...
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
JamesAnderson
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Re: New Firewall Filter

#6

Post by JamesAnderson »

I do hope they go to Blue Coat, it's the best filter for blocking problem sites, virus spreaders, porn, and other online safety issues on the web, they can trap many things everyone else misses, before you see it and it's almost ironclad, and getting better daily.

And they are able to now filter Youtube for the most part by content category, although that is new enough we'll have to report problem ones to Blue Coat via their publicly-availble site look up and reporting tool, but I doubt it will be all that long before much of what is a problem will be more accurately blocked. Using Blue Coat, it would allow. for FHCs some genealogy videos to be shown, useful for things like RootsTech events (next year) and genealogy conferences and workshops about anytime otherwise on those same lines that might be held in the building.
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Biggles
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Re: New Firewall Filter

#7

Post by Biggles »

The original notice about the change of Filter, mentioned a name beginning with a 'Z', if I recall correctly! I'm not in a position at the moment to check this out though!
JamesAnderson
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Re: New Firewall Filter

#8

Post by JamesAnderson »

I've heard that before, it's Zscaler, and it regularly misses a lot of bad sites. I've been running spam sites through it and it's scoring of problem websites, particularly some malware, phishing, and other spam sites that may contain other malicious code, is dismal. It even misses many blacklisted spam sites.

If you want to see threat scoring for yourself, go to http://zulu.zscaler.com/ and enter a URL.

There's no public way to suggest a change in general categorization of a site either. Websense had one, via email, and Blue Coat does, via the web. This feature is important as it will allow someone who finds a bad site that got miscategorized to report it directly to the provider, saving the help desk the trouble of going in and manually blocking it.

Zscaler's endpoint user base is probably under 10 million, Websense was much more, Sophos claims 150 million, and Blue Coat is around 80 million. Others like FortiGuard are good, but I don't know any stats, and most have difficult to access categorization change request procedures, only Blue Coat delivers an easily accessible categorization change request procedure, even the managers can request a categorization change that quickly there.
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