This category covers the web pages which provide web proxy service. This is a "browser inside a browser" type website when a user opens a web page, enters the requested URL into a form, and presses "Submit". The web proxy site downloads the actual page, and shows it inside the user browser.
There are the following reasons this type is detected (and might need to be blocked):
- For anonymous browsing. Since the requests to the destination web server are made from the proxy web server, only its IP address is visible and if the server administrators trace the user, the trace will end on web proxy – which may or may not keep logs necessary to locate the original user.
- For location spoofing. User IP addresses are often used for profiling the service by source location (some national government websites may only be available from local IP addresses), and using those services might help the user to spoof his true location.
- For accessing prohibited content. If a simple URL filter is used, it will only see the web proxy URLs and not the actual servers the user visits.
- For avoiding company monitoring. A business policy might require monitoring employee Internet usage. Accessing everything through web proxy the user might escape the monitoring, which will not provide correct information.
Since the SDK analyzes the HTML page (if provided), and not just URLs, for some categories the SDK still will be able to detect the content. Other reasons, however, cannot be avoided just using the SDK. Here you can find a large list of web proxies.
Example: http://www.hidemyass.com
