URL Filtering

[nagarjuna.b]

Hi All,

We were configuring different URL filtering profiles on PA 5250 firewalls for each environment. Since the requiremnet is one environment should access specific set of URL's and other should acccess another specific set of URL's. for example the PCI envirmnet should not access the URL's defined for the HIPPA environment.  So, we are ending up creating lot of URL filtering profiles as they needs to apply to different firewall rules. Right now we have 40 URL filtering profiles. Is there a way that we can simplify this? Could you please tell me how you handled this if you also had the same kind of problem. 

Kind regards,

Nagarjuna 

[reaper]

could you clarify how your environments are delimited? are they subnets, user groups, vsys?

if only a specific set of URLs may be accessed by an environment (assuming they're a subnet for now) you could create a custom, URL categroy containing all the URLs they're allowed to access and then adding that custom category to the "Service/URL Category" tab in the security policy, rather than  a unique urlfiltering profile per environment

[Brandon_Wertz]

@reaper can you clarify, if you use the URL category in policy do you get URL logs?  Or will you only get URL logs if you use a URL profile?

[reaper]

There wont be a URL log when you only set that action, but you can add an 'alert all' url filtering profile for logging purposes

[Brandon_Wertz]

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@reaper wrote:

There wont be a URL log when you only set that action, but you can add an 'alert all' url filtering profile for logging purposes

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Yeah...I think this is a big thing for admins to think about...when using the URL category via security policy instead of a URL profile there will be a lacking of those logs