Web content filtering is a new feature in Microsoft Defender ATP that enables security administrators to track and regulate access to websites based on specified content categories. You can configure policies within Microsoft Defender Security Center to block or gather access data on certain categories across your machine groups. This feature provides the following capabilities:
- Users are prevented from accessing websites in blocked categories, whether they are browsing on-premises or away
- Conveniently deploy varied policies to various sets of users using the machine groups defined in the Microsoft Defender ATP role-based access control settings
- Access web reports in the same central location, with visibility over actual blocks and web usage
- Support for most major web browsers, with blocks performed by SmartScreen and Network Protection.
For instance, you could set a policy to block ‘adult content sites’ across all of your machine groups, and create a separate policy to block ‘high bandwidth sites’ on just a few machine groups. Any category that is not being blocked will still have access information collected from them that you can view in the reports.
In order to give customers access to various sources of web content categorization data, we are very excited to partner with data providers for this functionality. We’ve chosen Cyren as our first partner, who we’ve worked with closely to build that integration. Cyren sends categorization data directly to our cloud, so no customer data will be leaving Microsoft boundaries. We then use this data to determine which blocks to perform on the end user's machine. In order to use this feature, you must acquire a separate license with Cyren, who offers a 60-day free trial license for Microsoft Defender ATP customers. Learn more about partner licensing.
Starting today, web content filtering is available for public preview in the Microsoft Defender Security Center. To begin, go to Settings > Advanced features, and click the Web content filtering toggle to turn the feature on. Then, go to Reports > Web reports and click “Connect to partner” on the lower card to start a Cyren trial. Also, check out our technical documentation.