Vice president of marketing Rick Kagan said the list comprises five million domains and about one billion pages. It was, of course, created mostly automatically with some human oversight. The list is categorized into 80 categories.
Fortinet made the decision to offer the feature as a hosted service, as the list weighs in at about 100MB. Requested URLs are checked against a Fortinet-hosted list to see if the category they fall into meets company surfing policy.
Kagan said that frequently accessed URLs are cached on the FortiGate devices, tospeed up access times. Companies tend to often have limited clusters of sites that all employees visits often, he said.
The FortiGate appliances already include firewall, VPN, signature-based intrusion prevention and antivirus features. The company has several teams of security researchers who develop all the content, such as virus definitions.
The two-year-old company previously used a URL list provided by Cerberian Inc. Kagan said that offering, also a hosted service, will still be supported. In earlier versions of the FortiGate appliances, users had to purchase their own URL lists.
