Features

Take advantage of 20 years of web filtering experience with powerful safeguarding features.

HTTPS Decryption

Nearly all websites now use encrypted connections. SurfProtect is able to intercept and decrypt HTTPS traffic and filter based on the underlying requests, ensuring pupils are protected even when using secure web services that might otherwise less advanced filters.

Category filtering

SurfProtect’s web filtering is built to block harmful or inappropriate material while still allowing access to safe and educational resources. Powered by a automatically updated classification database, it recognises new sites and emerging threats quickly, reducing the risk of harmful content slipping through. Policies can be customised by age group, role, or individual user, ensuring a tailored approach that balances protection with learning needs.

SurfProtect’s classification database has over 68 million entries which are split into 61 distinct categories. Alongside this, it stores manually-configured settings (rules for how to apply search term filtering or how a host relates to various application controls) for over 150 thousand hosts, reflecting 20 years of experience in web filtering.

Keyword filtering

SurfProtect also applies search term filtering to a number of websites, including search providers like Google, Bing, Brave, DuckDuckGo and websites like Wikipedia and YouTube, preventing users from making inappropriate searches. It offers 10 “sensible default” lists of search terms that customers can use (such as words related to weapons, drugs, and sex), in addition to allowing customers to define their own list of blocked search terms. These lists are available in the 10 most spoken languages in the UK.

DNS Interception

SurfProtect's DNS interception adds an extra layer of security to your filtering package, sending your requests through the NCSC PDNS service to protect you from malicious domains.

Analytics

SurfProtect records up to a year of web requests filtered by the service, which can be reviewed through the SurfProtect web panel.

The analytics dashboard provides a complete history of requests, including details such as usernames, search terms, and filtering decisions. The SurfProtect v2 Analytics Beta Dashboard also introduces visualisations of trends, request volumes, and content categories.

In addition to analytics, SurfProtect offers a real-time stream of filtered web traffic and the corresponding filtering decisions. This allows leaders, DSLs, and IT staff to search for specific traffic in real time, whether for monitoring or diagnosing filtering behaviour.

Real-Time Alerts

When urgent issues arise, SurfProtect delivers real-time alerts so staff can act quickly. Attempts to access high-risk content such as extremism, self-harm, or adult material can trigger immediate notifications to safeguarding teams. This early warning system enables rapid intervention, helping schools respond before risks escalate into harm.

SurfProtect Diagnostic tooling

As part of the SurfProtect Self Administration panel customers get access to a number of powerful diagnostic tools, used by our own support team, to enable them to identify issues with their filtering, understand why filtering decisions are being made and track down specific filtered web requests in realtime.

The SurfProtect Domain Doctor provides users with the ability to view the decision request and SurfProtect data for a given URL, filtered against a policy of their choice. This gives immediate feedback as to why a URL was blocked or allowed, and where they need to go to change that setting.

The SurfProtect Live Log stream allows users to view the realtime filtered web requests for the school, allowing them to filter it down by many criteria including but not limited to URL, the blocked or allowed status, specific usernames, IP address and more.