Server Web Control Policy

Web Control lets you restrict access to certain categories of website.

Restrictions

Web Control settings apply only to Windows servers.
Web Control settings don't apply to websites you've excluded. See Server Threat Protection Policy.

All servers to which this policy applies will use a Server Advanced license.

Go to My Products > Server > Policies to apply web control.

To set up a policy, do as follows:

Create a Web Control policy. See Create or Edit a Policy.
Open the policy's Settings tab and configure it as described below. Make sure the policy is turned on.

Note

If you updated a policy but it's not behaving as expected, clear the browser cache or cookies.

Website Controls

Select Website Controls to control access to websites that may be inappropriate.

For each website category, you can select:

Select Log web control events to log attempts to visit blocked websites or websites for which we display a warning.

Note

If you do not enable logging, only attempts to visit infected sites will be logged.

You can put websites into your own custom categories ("tag" them) and then use a Web Control policy to control sites in each category.

To set this up, do as follows.

Go to My Products > General Settings > Website Management.
Click Add.
In Add Website Customization, enter a website and add a tag. You can either type in a new tag name, or select a tag you've used before (you'll see suggested tags when you start typing). Click Save.

If you exclude a domain, then we automatically exclude all of its subdomains. For example, if you exclude http://google.com this also excludes http://www.google.com or http://foo.google.com.

You don't need to use any wildcards or special characters.
Go to My Products > Endpoint or Server and click Policies.
Under Web Control, select a policy.
Click the Settings tab.
Turn on Control sites tagged in Website Management.
Click Add New on the right of the page.
In Add Website Tag, do as follows.
- Select the website tag you created.
- Choose the Action you want to take against websites.
- Click Save.
On the Settings tab, click Save.

For more information on how Sophos filters websites see Sophos Web Security and Control Test Site.