The background for this scenario is a school district with more than 2300 students and 500 faculty and staff in a preschool, three elementary schools, a middle school, a high school, and a continuing education center. Each elementary school has a computer lab and the high school has three computer labs with connections to the Internet. Such easy access to the Internet ensures that every student touches a computer every day.

With such a diverse group of Internet users, it was not possible for the school district to set different Internet access levels. This meant that faculty and staff were unable to view websites that the school district had blocked. Another issue was the students’ use of proxy sites to circumvent the previous web filtering system. A proxy server acts as a go-between for users seeking to view web pages from another server. If the proxy server has not been blocked by the school district, the students can access the blocked website.

When determining what websites are appropriate for each school, the district examined a number of factors, such as community standards and different needs of each school based on the age of the students.

The district decided to configure the FortiGate web filtering options to block content of an inappropriate nature and to allow each individual school to modify the options to suit the age of the students. This way, each individual school was able to add or remove blocked sites almost immediately and have greater control over their students’ Internet usage.

In this simplified example of the scenario, the district wants to block any websites with the word example on them, as well as the website www.example.com. The first task is to create web content filter lists for the students and the teachers.