Quarantining Users Trying to Bypass Filtering

The Quarantine feature temporarily blocks all internet traffic when a device activates a filtering policy with the Quarantine enabled. Your Linewize appliance stops the quarantined user’s internet access for three minutes by default. A new quarantine period will start each time the user violates the policy while their device is connected to your physical network. You can ask Linewize Support to change the default time for Quarantined devices.

Enabling Quarantine

Here’s an example of using quarantine to prevent the use of VPN, anonymous proxy, or TOR inside your school. You will enable the Quarantine feature on a filter using the filtering Signature for Proxies and VPNs. Most VPN services will timeout if the device is disconnected from the internet for three minutes.

1. In School Manager, select Filtering > Content Filtering.

2. Select Create Policy.

3. Enter a Name, for example, “Block VPN on campus - temporarily stop internet access”.

4. Start typing the category or signature you want to block, such as “VPNs”, and selecting the “Proxies and VPNs” category.

5. (Optional) You can add a User, Group, or Network Range in Criteria. Type the name of the Group or enter the Network Range. In this example, we recommend adding a Group to apply this policy only to students.
6. Select the Quarantine checkbox.
7. Select Save Policy.

You can take this filtering policy one step further by creating a more granular quarantine policy with specific criteria for students who struggle to stay on task and are known to attempt to bypass the network by using VPN extensions in their web browsers.

Activating Quarantine

You can find details about users who activated quarantine in Statistics > Realtime > Users and Hosts.
Look for a red banner in the Quarantined column. In addition to the IP and Hardware (MAC address), you can see the user’s Login Time and the number of Connections they attempted.
See Realtime Connections Overview for more details.