Raffle: GFI WebMonitor – Web Filtering

In my last post, I described GFI WebMonitor’s monitoring capabilities. Today, I will introduce the tool’s web-filtering features. If you want to have a chance to win a license for 500 clients worth 8,500 dollars, please refer to the end of the article.

The main purpose of web filtering is to prevent your company’s employees from spending time on the web for personal interests. Since many of the sites with the most popular web content—you know what I’m talking about—often contain malware, it will also improve security if you block them. The temptation to use the web for private matters at work has been growing along with the possibilities of the web.

The WebGrade database

GFI maintains a list of sites that are most likely unrelated to work in the so-called WebGrade database. I tried a few popular sites and GFI WebMonitor always blocked access to them. In such cases, WebMonitor displays a message in the user’s browser that the web site has been blocked from viewing.

GFI categorizes web sites, which allows you to block only certain site types. For example, you could block games and dating sites, but allow financial services. There are more than 70 such categories, which gives you an idea of how big this database already is. Of course, it is practically impossible to categorize the whole web. Therefore, there are certainly sites that users aren’t supposed to access but which are in the WebGrade database. However, this doesn’t really affect the effectiveness of WebMonitor’s filter.

First of all, the majority of users will try to access the most popular sites, which are all in the database. This alone prevents a lot of damage to your company. Even more importantly, users can’t know in advance which sites are blocked because GFI doesn’t publish the contents of the WebGrade database.

Once your users know that access to blocked sites is logged with their user names, and that admins will be notified whenever a company policy is violated, they will no longer feel like trying to outsmart your filter. And, since the WebGrade database is updated regularly, they can never be sure that a site that once was accessible is now in the list of blocked sites. Thus, whenever they are tempted to distract themselves from their work by surfing the web, they have to worry about being exposed.

Configuring web access

Just in case your company allows users to access the web for private matters after office hours, you can schedule WebMonitor’s filtering policies. Furthermore, you can apply a policy only to certain users, groups, or IP addresses; and you can define exceptions. It is also possible to assign different admin email addresses to which a notification will be sent whenever a user violates a policy.

If you’d like to have the chance to win a GFI WebMonitor license for 500 clients worth 8,500 US dollars, please send an email to

with the subject line,

GFI WebMonitor.

You can also just leave a comment below. The deadline for entering this contest is February 25, 2010.