About URL Filtering

Palo Alto Networks URL filtering solution enables you to block and allow access to websites based on URL category and information such as user and group.
Palo Alto Networks URL Filtering protects against web-based threats by giving you a way to safely enable web access while controlling how your users interact with online content. You can create policy rules to limit access to sites based on URL categories, users, and groups. (See URL Filtering Use Cases for different ways you can leverage URL Filtering to meet your organization’s web security needs.)
With URL Filtering enabled, all web traffic (HTTP and HTTPS) on any port is:
  • Compared against the URL filtering database, which contains millions of websites that have been categorized. You can use these URL categories in URL Filtering profiles or as match criteria to enforce Security policy. You can also use URL filtering to enforce safe search settings for your users and to prevent credential theft based on URL category. With the addition of an Advanced URL Filtering license, URLs exhibiting suspicious qualities are simultaneously analyzed in real-time using machine learning to provide protection against new and unknown threats that do not currently exist in the URL filtering database.
  • Inspected for phishing and malicious JavaScript using inline machine learning (ML), a firewall-based analysis solution, which can block unknown malicious web pages in real-time.
Although the Palo Alto Networks URL filtering solution, PAN-DB, allows you to choose between the PAN-DB Public Cloud and the PAN-DB Private Cloud, use the public cloud solution if the Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewalls on your network can directly access the Internet. If the network security requirements in your enterprise prohibit the firewalls from directly accessing the Internet, you can deploy a PAN-DB private cloud on one or more M-600 appliances that function as PAN-DB servers within your network.

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