What is DrayTek's URL Reputation Filtering?

DrayTek's URL Reputation Filtering is a feature designed to enhance network security by categorizing and assessing the reputation of URLs accessed by devices on the network. This filtering technology helps to protect against various online threats such as malware, phishing, and malicious websites.

Here's how it typically works:

 

URL Categorization:

DrayTek's system categorizes URLs into different groups based on their content and purpose. These categories might include things like "Social Media," "News," "Financial," "Malware," etc.

 

Reputation Assessment:

Each URL is assigned a reputation score based on various factors such as its history, the presence of malware, phishing attempts, etc. URLs with a poor reputation score are likely to be blocked or flagged as potentially harmful.

 

Filtering Policies:

Administrators can define filtering policies based on categories or reputation scores. For example, they might choose to block access to URLs categorized as "Malware" or with a low reputation score.

 

Real-Time Updates:

The URL reputation database is regularly updated to ensure that the filtering system can effectively identify and block emerging threats.

 

With these methods, DrayTek's URL filtering can proactively safeguard your network and sensitive data. Take a look at some of the reasons why it's a great option for any network security setup:

 

No Reliance on Community Categorisation

Unlike other platforms, DrayTek's URL Reputation is a professional service and doesn't rely on community submissions for URL categorisation. This autonomous system keeps inaccuracies, delays, and omissions down to a bare minimum - common in crowd-sourced databases - and its cloud-based infrastructure updates every five minutes to ensure the information is always up-to-date.

 

Content Filtering Built Right Into the Hardware

Embedded within the hardware itself, URL Reputation goes above and beyond traditional solutions for content filtering. These traditional methods normally require upkeep on each device and aren't too tricky to circumvent if you know how. However, DrayTek's URL Reputation operates at the point of entry of your network, scrutinizing all requested web URLs in their entirety.

 

IP-Address Based

Unlike conventional services, URL Reputation categorizes sites based on IP addresses, and its capability to assign multiple categories to a single site ensures nuanced filtering. It also analyzes complete URLs, unlike services limited to top-level domains which will stop inspecting URLs after the first "/".

 

Resistant to DNS Manipulation

URL Reputation isn't a DNS Resolution service, meaning URL Reputation inspects entire web requests; it can't be bypassed by changing the DNS settings on a PC or searching by IP address instead of URL, and its zero-hour protection means it classifies sites instantly and automatically in real time.