SmoothWall.net home page Evaluate SmoothWall
» Company Information » Testimonials » Case Studies » Press, Reviews & PR » Key Staff Biographies » News Archive » Events » Jobs
» Cyberbullying – A guide for ICT staff in Schools » Secure Wireless » Anonymous Proxies » Load Balancing » Blocking Ultrasurf and HTTPS proxies
- Firewall & VPN - » Advanced Firewall 2008 » Corporate Firewall 2008 » School Guardian 2008 » VPN and Secure Remote Access » Express - Web Security & Content Filtering - » Network Guardian 2008 » School Guardian 2008 » SmoothGuardian - Email Security - » SmoothZap 2008 - Bandwidth Management (QoS) - » SmoothTraffic 2008 - Appliances - » SmoothGuard 1000-UTM - Our Full Product List - » Brochures & Datasheets » Feature Comparison Chart » How to Buy
» Reseller List » Become a Partner » PartnerNet this is a link to external content
» Support from SmoothWall » Support from SmoothWall Partners » Supported Products » FAQ & Knowledge Base » Submit a Support Ticket » Manuals » Downloads » Training » Hardware Compatibility Guide » Product Updates » Blocklist Addition/Removal » Password Generator » Glossary » Terms & Conditions
» SmoothWall.org » Version 3 Sources » Version 4 Sources » Version 5 Sources » Version 2008 Sources
» Addresses and Phone Numbers » Sales/Pre-Sales Enquiry » PR Contacts » Account/Invoice Enquiries » Submit a Support Ticket
CompanySolutionsProductsPartnersSupportCommunityContact Us
home »
Anonymous Proxies

An anonymous proxy is a website which allows the user to browse through it to other sites without disclosing their URLs to any filtering software. All that the filtering software will see is the URL or IP address of the proxy. As illustrated below, the proxy is typically presented to the user as a form.


click to enlarge »


Often, the URL of the proxy is misleading - education administrators recently finding (the now defunct) mathshelp.info and examstudies.com littering their logs. Although they look like legitimate sites, they are actually anonymous proxies!

How do your users find an anonymous proxy? Easy - try entering "unblock myspace" into Google!



Hundreds of thousands of sites offering the same thing - anonymous proxying. To make matters totally impossible for a URL filter, the addresses of these sites change frequently, rendering a URL blocklist impossible to maintain.

How Does Guardian Block Anonymous Proxies

Dynamic Content Analysis is the answer. Guardian examines all received web pages, not just for objectionable content and malware but also for the tell-tale signatures of a proxy. Despite the efforts of many proxy sites to hide their function, Guardian will detect them based on the proxy signatures which are present in one of the dozens of categories included in Guardian's daily blocklist update.
Network Guardian 2008

NECC 2008, San Antonio, Texas, USA


Web Security and Content Filtering Bandwidth Management (QoS) Firewall & VPN