I want to ensure they\'re not downloading any illegal content (torrent websites

Question

I want to ensure they're not downloading any illegal content (torrent websites in particular). If they're using a VPN or Tor, then I guess there's not much I can do, but if they're just connecting directly to, say, pirate bay, without masking their traffic and downloading content through them, is there a way for me to spot that and tell them off?

I'm not interested in throttling their traffic or monitoring what websites they otherwise visit. I'm only interested in detecting if they access the popular torrent websites (pirate bay, kickass, demonoid etc.) and download stuff through them.

Explanation / Answer

I guess that most corporate people setting up Internet access for the employees may have the same need: how to ensure that employee does not waste enterprise's bandwith to download torrents?

Usually, the main answer lies in two things:

- Restrict the destination port numbers to the really needed ones,
- Setup a DNS cache server, which can provide an easy way to blacklist certain domain names (this implies that rules above do not allow port 53 as destination port),
- Make the HTTP flow go through a proxy,in the current case a non caching proxy like privoxy may be usefull.

For HTTPS content, you will not be able to check the actual page or data content however you will be able to know the domain name of the website currently visited (both thanks to DNS requests and SNI) and compare it to a blacklist, which seems sufficient for your needs.

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