Web Browsing Safely

In my last post I talked about not controlling what my children click on.

Well this is only partially true. I don’t monitor or log their keystrokes or any other form of intrusive monitoring but I do use a URL filter. In keeping with wanting to use the best and, if possible, for free (personally I donate money to folks that do this), then I utilise K9 from Bluecoat Systems. Bluecoat offers corporate filtering appliances that cost many hundreds if not thousands of pounds to purchase and maintain (and I troubleshoot these things as part of my day to day job). On the back of this, they also offer a free product for individual per PC use called K9 - this is a Web-based service in that you install a local client that talks to Bluecoat’s backend systems. I think it is excellent and for a free product does what it says on its tin. It does have drawbacks and the one that bugs me is not being able to set individual filter preferences for each user on my PC - but that is small and, I am told, in the pipeline of development.

I also use a personal sandbox or virtual PC to do my surfing from within and have tried to educate my children to do so but I haven’t been forcing them to do so. But after last week’s Vundo infection I am now forcing them to use a sandbox to surf from within and my personal choices came down to two. One was (note I say was) GreenBorder and the second is Sandboxie.

Unfortunately for now, GreenBorder has been purchased by Google and its current product is no longer available. When it was, it was a $20 piece of software that did what it said. I remain hopeful that it will re-surface from within Google Apps as a freebie, but as yet no news that I can find out The other option is free and still very much available and does a nice job of protecting the PC.

In short, you can open, run, and install anything within the sandbox environment and even return to it after a PC reboot if needs be. However, because it is shut off from the PC in its own virtual environment any infection or other nasty you get stays within that virtual environment. So testing of new software, etc can be done within this virtual area and if it is deemed clean after a week or so of usage, then it is a simple enough operation to transfer the install to your actual PC. And now, I’m forcing any use of Firefox or IE to have to go through the sandbox - so for now, I don’t care what they end up clicking on as I only need to restart their infected virtual environment to get a clean session back.

I love it. What do you do, I’d love to hear?