TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW

The Netsweeper application is designed to manage the access and activity of administered users.

HOW IT WORKS:

Policy Service

A filtering policy is a set of rules or settings that the Netsweeper Policy Service uses in making decisions about whether requests for internet content should be allowed or denied. The Netsweeper solution allows you to create one or more unique policies for groups of people or workstations. Each workstation is deemed a client, with each client being part of a group. Every filtering group can have one or many policies to determine what they can or cannot access on the web.

Dynamic Content Classification - Category Name Service

Netsweeper has a multitude of content categories, with some available for blocking and others available for usage reporting purposes. Category filtering can be defined as sorting URLs into subject categories and subsequently filtering based on subject content. Netsweeper’s Dynamic Categorization Engine scans and sorts the content of billions of websites and adds this information to a database of categorized sites maintained on the Netsweeper Category Name Server (CNS). Each URL is categorized by Netsweeper, and based on these categories URLs can be allowed or denied.

Monitoring Graphs

Our monitoring graphs can be modelled to display real-time or time frame data. Graphs can be created to feature custom data in time frames of 3 months, 30 days, 7 days, or 24 hours. Also customizable are the specific servers you wish to monitor at any specific time to effectively find the exact data you wish to search for. Furthermore, default generated graphs alike can be found on the web-admin home page.

Reporting

We generate reports for you that are easy to understand, giving you the power to review Internet usage on your network. The data from our reporting services provides insight into network traffic or information on specific requests, websites, or users. The high-performance reporter can gather requests based on specified criteria and sort them, calculate statistics, and present results in tables and charts.

HTTPS Selective Filtering - NSProxy

We have developed an advanced high speed NSProxy service capable of delivering 10Gbps of throughput and up to 6Gbps of selective SSL decryption throughput. This service becomes more crucial as more and more of the internet is becoming SSL driven. Netsweeper can also filter HTTPS and filter by hostname without breaking encryption. Advanced social media SSL protection is an example of how our technologies are helping in today’s digital world. With NSProxy, we can allow access to the safe areas of social media, while restricting access to the potentially dangerous ones.

Authentication & Integration

Authentication is crucial to allow access to content for authorized users such as teachers, and restrict or block access to content for unauthorized users such as students. We offer Authentication Redirect features that empower you to authenticate users, ultimately placing them in different groups based on their authentication for a seamless online experience.

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Look Under the Hood

IIS Portal

The IIS Authentication Redirect Portal is an implementation of the Netsweeper authentication portal for Microsoft IIS. The IIS Authenticated Redirect Portal can transparently authorize any user logged on to the Microsoft Domain where the portal has been installed. This means that you can feel secure and safe on the web while using your existing infrastructure for user and rights management.

Active Directory

This agent-less integration with popular directory services provides complete user identification, enabling simple, application-based policy definition per user or group. Netsweeper supports a variety of directory servers, including Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP Server), Microsoft Active Directory (AD) and Novell eDirectory.

WebAdmin APIs

The WebAdmin APIs allows customers to integrate with the Netsweeper database via a simple to use Web API. The two versions of the API include Direct URL and SOAP APIs. Both have similar functionality and allow you as the customer to seamlessly integrate your existing provisioning and management infrastructure with Netsweeper as one solution!

Authentication Portal API

Netsweeper supports Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS), a client/server protocol and software that enables remote access servers to communicate with a central authority server authorizing user access. This approach provides organizations with better security, allows companies to maintain user profiles in a central database and apply policies at a single administrated network point. Through our authentication portal API, we allow for customization of the authorization process to meet various educational and business requirements.

Language Editor

With our Translation Editor, we provide our clients with the ability to translate original text from the WebAdmin, Profile Manager, and Client Filters into different languages. Languages supported today include English, French, Japanese, Greek, Russian, Thai & Arabic! Our Translation Editor is simple to use, allowing for a seamless translation experience of the user interface in any language, including Klingon if you so choose!

BYOD & Client Filters

With organizations across the world becoming increasingly dependent on mobile communication and work habits, security for all devices has become paramount. Thankfully, our solutions support the new BYOD trend, allowing any device connected to a Wi-Fi network to be filtered and secure. In addition, no software installs are required on your devices, as filtering takes place using the device IP address.

Furthermore, optional lightweight mobile and desktop clients are available for Windows, MAC, OSX, Google Chrome, Chrome browser, iOS, and Android ensuring that roaming or off network users are protected regardless of their location.

Social Media Controls

Social media can be a powerful communication tool, however, in certain scenarios it can also be detrimental to the activity at hand. Social media controls can be used in the office or at home during a child’s school work time. Time segments can be used to block social media at certain points in the day, or all together on a given network. We help you become more productive when you need to be with our effective social media controls.

DNS

Netsweeper 5.1 and above makes security simple by providing a highly scalable embedded DNS service. The Netsweeper Powered DNS Filtered Technology is a scalable, reliable, and managed authoritative DNS service. The service provides low latency, high availability and is a cost-effective way to make Netsweeper policy enforcement and services available to your users. Capabilities include but are limited to: the ability to deny with a hostname; the ability to deny with an IP; per URL deny rewriting and allows for safe search enforcement in lists.

Quarantine Capabilities

The Netsweeper Quarantine system gives your organization the power to quarantine high-risk users, ensuring the safety of your network. The system allows our customers to flag specific clients as ‘quarantined’. In many cases, this is done after the Netsweeper system detects that a client has visited multiple websites containing viruses. Our APIs and RADIUS functionality allow you to flag or mark a client as quarantined after they have been detected as a high-risk user. This approach ensures the safety of your network, and in turn, your organization.

Netsweeper Anti "3" for Malware, Phishing, and Viruses

Our Web Security platform provides a solution that detects zero-day and known malware threats such as viruses, spyware, phishing frauds, and other forms of malicious code. By correlating current traffic and request trends, multiple detection technologies, automated machine-learning heuristics, and the industry’s largest data set of categorized web content, Netsweeper provides the most technological and cost effective solution to combat new and known malicious content to keep you safe.

Web filters that do not provide real-time analysis of content often miss harmful URLS, allowing inappropriate content to be accessed by users. We give our customers peace of mind knowing that we go beyond standard URL lists to protect clients from all unwanted content.