Firewalls

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10

Content Filtering

10.1 Chapter objectives

■ Understanding critical protection offered by content filtering

■ Understanding the types of attacks

■ The types of filtering

■ What the future holds: Adaptability is key

Content filtering, defined, provides a level of network traffic exami-

nation that prevents harmful content from entering or leaving a

network. This content may be cloaked within seemingly harmless

HTTP traffic, it may be HTTP traffic, or it may be some other

hijacking attempt trying to socially engineer itself past firewall

defenses. It may be a full-blown Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack, or it

may be someone internally using a web site e-mail ...