Sophos Anti-Virus for Windows 2000+: overview of web content scanning

Sophos Anti-Virus for Windows 2000+, version 7.6.0 includes web content scanning functionality. This delivers a plug-in for Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7, which intercepts web content and scans it for malware.

Key features

• Prevents web based malware from executing in HTML, scripts, streaming media and images.
  When a web-based attack is discovered within the main web page or within a sub-element of it, the original content is blocked and replaced with a safe report page. A desktop message is generated for each piece of malicious content that is blocked. The malicious code is prevented from executing, so no clean up is necessary.
  
  The report page and the desktop message (localised into all Sophos languages) provide information to the user about what happened when the malicious content was blocked. The plugin attempts to preserve as much of the the look of the original web site as possible, thereby providing much of the original browsing experience.
  
• Logging
  Malware that is prevented is logged in the Sophos Anti-Virus log. The new log messages include the URL of the infected page, and the name and type of the malware. The protocol element of the URL is modified to prevent accidental launching of the malicious content if you view the log text in a viewer that converts URL text into a clickable link.
  
• Enterprise console reporting
  Blocked pages are reported to the Enterprise console in 'report only' mode, so that an alert is not raised. This is because the malicious content has been deleted from the endpoint, and no Administrator intervention is required to clean up the threat.

Enabling and managing web content scanning

• How to centrally enable or disable web content scanning
• How to locally enable or disable web content scanning
• How to manage web content scanning policies
• How to centrally exclude sites from being scanned by Sophos web content scanning
• How to centrally exclude Internet Explorer Security Zones from being scanned by Sophos web content scanning

Scanning and scanning issues

• For information on the way in which Sophos web content scanning works, and what to do if it does not work in the way you expect, refer to Sophos Anti-Virus for Windows 2000+: web scanning issues.