Web content filtering refers to a technique that blocks malicious and offensive web pages to secure your web experience and free you from viruses.
What is Web Content Filtering?
Web content filtering is a technique that blocks malicious, offensive, inappropriate, or even dangerous. Use includes a company keeping employees from visiting known spam sites or school systems restricting students from adult content. Web filtering protects users' and organizations’ employee web experiences. Families are well aware of the necessity to utilize internet content filters to block information that is inappropriate for young children, but content filtering also has a place in the business world.
How does content filtering work?
Web content filtering works on the basis of a site’s content grouped into categories. In other words, it works by using hardware or software-based solution to create rules about the types of sites that may be visited. With the help of keywords or other commonalities between sites, content is grouped into categories such as sports, gambling, adult, streaming, and so on. And those sites in undesirable categories are blocked on the network.
It’s important to protect your children from objectionable or sexual content, and this is a more obvious case for web content filtering. But DNS filtering, a specific type of content filtering that uses the DNS layer to filter based on IP addresses. DNS filtering is highly used by businesses for controlling web use and reducing infections. When content is filtered according to sites known to pose a high risk of malware, those sites can be blocked before they have the chance to drop malicious payloads.
Why is web content filtering important?
Hacking, phishing, viruses, and malware are some of the biggest threats emerging online. These online threats target businesses, individuals, and other members of society. These online threats may disturb you, can mislead your child, and download malware from your system to gain access to your system to attack. Undeniably, the loss or corruption of sensitive data such as login credentials, personal information, accounting details, and legal documents can be catastrophic to any company. Hence the importance of content filtering protocols. Web content filtering has a multitude of benefits for both individual users and organizations.
- Protect and minors from inappropriate content
- Reduced malware infections
- Protection against exploit kits
- Reduce inappropriate content
- Minimized company liability
Protect and minors from inappropriate content
Protecting and monitoring children from inappropriate content is the primary benefit and use of web content filtering. These sites may include inappropriate content such as pornographic and violent content. Today are becoming tech-savvy and this is good, but it has a negative side as well if we do not keep our eyes on the children. However, parents may not always be physically presented to watch and monitor their children’s activity online; here web content filtering needs come in. As it keeps away the offensive and inappropriate content from your children's reach.
Reduced malware infections
Content filtering means blocking malicious, offensive, inappropriate or dangerous web pages. So, when you will not access the dangerous or offensive malicious web page, it means the chances of malware infections goes reduced. That’s how it protects you from malware infections.
Protection against exploit kits
Cybersecurity technology is continually evolving, and at the same time, hackers are also developing smarter ways to illegally access your data and networks. Exploits kits contain code designed specifically to attack web browser’s vulnerabilities through browsers extensions and plugins. It may possible that you unknowingly click on a malicious link that has an exploit kit that triggers a malware download once the vulnerabilities are exploited. In this case, content filters can effectively identify exploit kits and block off access before any download is committed.
Reduce inappropriate content
Most websites create inappropriate content on the web page to earn money online as the generation is seeking sexual content on the web. But, internet content filters help protect employees from malware and phishing attacks. Educating them on the importance of these measures also goes a long way to guarantee efficiency, however, in the instance that some of them still seek out risky sites, the filtering protocols protect your network.
Minimized company liability
Preventing employees from visiting malicious web pages need more employment, and paid software that offers multiple device compatibility. It’s really tough and expensive to arrange these kinds of software. Therefore, web content filtering is one solution that prevents your employees, your kids that blocks all the dangerous and inappropriate content on the web and keeps you, your business, your kids, and others secure that directly minimize the company liability.
4 Types of Web Content Filtering
Web content filtering can be classified into 4 categories that block web pages.
- Keyword Filtering
- Web Category Filtering
- URL Filtering
- DNS Filtering
Keyword Filtering
Keyword-based web content filtering blocks users from visiting a website that has specific keywords in text strings. For example, you’re collecting information on the pornography crime, but you see the block page, it may that “pornography” is a keyword and this keyword is in the blocklist.
Web Category Filtering
This complete guide is about web content filtering so you may have already understood its meaning. In a Nutshell, web category filtering is used to block websites based on content categories such as offensive, sexual, violent, and social media. Software is used that categorizes the web content and on the basis of this, web content filtering blocks the page that comes under inappropriate category.
URL Filtering
As its name suggests, URL filtering allows or blocks the particular URL of the website, page so that you can’t visit the page or website. For example, you type URL into your address bars such as Priil.com or Priil.com/blog. URL filtering blocks or allows access to specific websites or web pages based on these URLs.
DNS Filtering
Blocking websites using a Domain Name System (DNS) filter is similar to filtering using a URL filter from the perspective of the end-user. Both systems allow you to enter a website to the web content filtering software's blocklist in order to limit access to it.
Final Touch
Hey guys! This was the guide about “what is web content filtering.” Web content filtering helps you to secure your kid's technical world and ensure that the internet comes into their life after filtering all the online negativities. Hope you find this article helpful and informative. If you still have any queries regarding this article, please let us know in the comment section below.