topic Re: Controlling ActiveX traffic in General Topics

Controlling ActiveX traffic

asecus — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:16:34 GMT

It's possible to control ActiveX traffic? Of course this is not an application, but it would improve secuity on the PAN device. The same for other embedded objects (Java Applets,etc.) and embedded scripts (javascript,Visual Basic script,etc).

Any ideas about the future or wath we can already do ?

Thanks Boris

Re: Controlling ActiveX traffic

jwolach — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:16:04 GMT

Boris,

I'm going to take a stab at this and say that if you set up a block .OCX files action in a File Blocking Profile on your PAN device you should be able to stop ActiveX Controls. Here is what I found on-line about .OCX files.

An OCX is an Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) custom control, a special-purpose program that can be created for use by applications running on Microsoft's Windows systems.

Microsoft now calls an OCX an ActiveX control, the component object under Microsoft's set of ActiveX technologies, of which the fundamental concept is the Component Object Model (COM) and, in a network, the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM).

Maybe someone at Palo Alto can add to this.

Thanks,
Jeff

Re: Controlling ActiveX traffic

nrice — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:42:23 GMT

I verified with Support on this one and they say that the PAN won't block ActiveX. It can only be blocked through the browser settings.

Re: Controlling ActiveX traffic

fredallee — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:00:09 GMT

Yes, we can block activex via file blocking. The file type for activex is ocx.

Alfred