Every time you visit a website, your computer is making a Domain Name Service (DNS) internet request to retrieve the information a bit like using the phonebook of the internet.
So when you type in “example.com”, what you’re actually doing is asking a DNS server “What is the IP address of example.com?” for it to find it and take you to the right website.
With Internet DNS Filtering, when you type in a website’s domain, a filtering process takes place between the IP address being retrieved and the page being displayed. This filtering process categorises the site into a variety of groupings that include news and media, social networking, malicious, illegal content, and much more.
When internet filtering is in place and someone tries to access an inappropriate site, users will instead see a block message page to tell them the content is restricted.
Organisations often put a security internet filter in place to block employees or guest Wi-Fi users from specific sites. A business might choose to block social media sites during work hours for their employees for example, or to prevent illegal content being accessed.
Internet filtering also provides an effective way of blocking users from malicious content, such as phishing schemes and malware.
Firewalls and antivirus software are important parts of the your cybersecurity arsenal.
A firewall offers a barrier between a local network (such as a computer) and the internet, serving the purpose of blocking unwelcome network traffic from external attackers. While some firewalls can block similar content to a dedicated Internet Filter, they usually cannot dynamically categorise and block content or prevent existing malware from making additional requests.
Firewalls are only concerned about attacks to the network and won’t stop existing threats from getting worse.
Antivirus software adds another line of defence by monitoring your computer and looking for suspicious files and activities that may indicate you’ve downloaded some sort of malware or trojan.
Together, they provide some good cybersecurity protection, but your firewall and antivirus software will NOT catch:
Internet security filtering fills those gaps to provide another layer of protection to make your company more secure. It can catch “zero-day threats” (that is, threats that have never been seen before) and prevent existing malware from sending DNS requests. And that means it can mitigate or stop the spread of existing malware, giving your antivirus software time to locate and delete the threat.
Layered, and proactive security is increasingly important. You need your firewall and your malware antivirus software, but you also need DNS filtering. Because all of them do different things and protect you in different phases of your work day.
Even with cybersecurity awareness training, if the hackers are motivated enough they can convince that person to click the link. They can find information from public social media pages, press releases, or even business pages and leverage that to convince end users that they are trustworthy. And this happens quickly!
This is why solutions that block threats instantly, even when they’ve never been seen before, are necessary so that the DNS request for that malicious site doesn’t get resolved and put the end user and the entire company at tremendous risk.
It’s not enough to just block threats. If you have no insight into what you’re blocking, you’ll never be able to improve both security and content filtering as a whole.
Visibility gives your company a clearer picture of:
You can then use these insights to make recommendations around both security and productivity.
Technology is amazing. It gives us the ability to accomplish more in a given day than we could have dreamed up 150 years ago. With high digitisation in professional services and B2B sectors, our productivity has increased in nearly every industry.
But technology also introduces a new set of obstacles that stand in the way of our daily efficiencies. Social media, news websites, gaming platforms like Steam, online forums, messaging clients, even our email can be a source of decreased productivity. And those are just the things we can access using a web browser. Which is exactly the point!