System and method of controlling access to the internet

• US 8,015,174 B2
• Filed: 02/28/2007
• Issued: 09/06/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 02/28/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Forcepoint LLC
• Original Assignee: Forcepoint LLC
• Inventors: Hubbard, Dan
• Primary Examiner(s): Ali; Mohammad
• Assistant Examiner(s): Willis; Amanda
• Application Number:
  US11/680,484
• Publication Number:
  US 20080208868A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,651 Days
• Field of Search: 707/694, 707781-784, 707/E17.008, 707999003-99901, 726 22- 30
• US Class Current: 707/709
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9535 Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation

Abstract

Certain embodiments provide for systems and methods of monitoring data sent from a requested device to a requesting device and removing certain portions of the data such as malicious or otherwise objectionable content. Objectionable content may include, for example, potentially executable web content. In certain embodiments, the systems and methods remove uniform resource locator (URL) links from the intercepted data which point to web pages having malicious or otherwise objectionable content.

Claims

1. A method of monitoring data sent from a requested device to a requesting device, the method comprising:

identifying, at a gateway server, an outgoing request from the requesting device, the outgoing request comprising a search request and the requested device comprising a search engine;

intercepting, at the gateway server, content sent from the requested device in response to the outgoing request, the intercepted content comprising search results for display on a web page returned by the search engine, the search results comprising a list of uniform resource locators;

determining categories of at least some of the intercepted uniform resource locators by comparing the at least some of the intercepted uniform resource locators to a portion of information from a categorized URL-content database, the information in the URL-content database based on at least;

a record of a number of repeated requests for a web content referenced by a URL, the number exceeding a threshold;

a priority associated with a collection source, the collection source configured to provide a URL referencing a web content and to provide data regarding the web content referenced by the URL; and

an indication of whether a web content referenced by a URL comprises active content;

modifying the content by removing at least one of the uniform resource locators from the list of uniform resource locators on the web page returned by the search engine based at least in part on the categories of the uniform resource locators in the search results; and

sending the modified content for display on the requesting device.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising sending the intercepted content to a collection module if the intercepted content is not already in the database.

3. The method of claim 2, further comprising collecting data related to the intercepted content not already in the database.

4. The method of claim 3, further comprising determining a candidate status for the one or more URL links not in the database based on the collected data.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the list of uniform resource locators is identified by the search engine as being relevant to the search request submitted to the search engine.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein uniform resource locators categorized as being potentially harmful content are removed from the content when the content is modified.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the gateway server computer is located on the requesting device.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the URL-content database is located on a server separate from the gateway server.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein modifying the content is further based in part on instructions from a policy module, the policy module located on the gateway server.

10. A system for monitoring content sent from a first device comprising a search engine to a second device comprising a user workstation in response to a request by the second device for data from the first device, the system comprising:

a gateway server module executed by a processor on a gateway server computer configured to;

intercept the content sent from the first device to the second device, wherein the content comprises a collection of uniform resource locators sent in response to a search engine query, the search engine query being sent from the second device to the first device; and

determine categories associated with uniform resource locators within the content based at least partially on a comparison of the intercepted content with a portion of data in a categorized URL-content database, the database configured to store data indicative of categorized uniform resource locators and uncategorized uniform resource locators, wherein the data in the URL-content database is based on at least;

a record of a number of repeated requests for a web content referenced by a URL, the number exceeding a threshold;

a priority associated with a collection source, the collection source configured to provide a URL referencing a web content and to provide data regarding the web content referenced by the URL; and

an indication of whether a web content referenced by a URL comprises active content; and

a content filtering module configured to modify the collection of uniform resource locators by removing at least some of the collection of uniform resource locators based at least in part on the categories.

11. The system of claim 10, wherein the gateway server module is further configured to send the intercepted content to a collection module if the intercepted content is not already in the database.

12. The system of claim 10, further comprising a collection module configured to collect data related to the intercepted content if the intercepted content is not already in the database.

13. The system of claim 12, further comprising a classification module configured to receive the intercepted content from the collection module and further configured to determine a classification for the intercepted content.

14. The system of claim 10, wherein the list of uniform resource locators is identified by the search engine as being relevant to the search request submitted to the search engine.

15. The system of claim 10, wherein uniform resource locators categorized as being objectionable content are removed from the content when the content is modified.

16. The system of claim 10, wherein the user workstation is the gateway server computer.

17. The system of claim 10, wherein the URL-content database is located on a server separate from the gateway server.

18. The system of claim 10, further comprising a policy module located on the gateway server computer, the policy module configured to provide instructions indicating what uniform resource locators to remove from the collection of uniform resource locators based on the categories associated with the uniform resource locators in the records of the database.