Guest User!

You are not Sophos Staff.

This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

Wildcard usage methods. Is it available ?

Hi All,

General built-in Web categories are not enough for creating special in-depth web policies for non english spoken countries.
Other than english languages foreign ones has its unique words, sentences even letters affects the domain names accordingly.
These variables creates hardness for preparing secure network through policies.

Is there any option available to resolve this kind of requirements in the Sophos Xg devices?

How to use wildcards and/or asterisks in Sophos Firewall and/or Cloud Endpoint Protection?

Exanple usage;


To block any host for site.com use:
*.site.com

Another example when streaming-media category is blocked, The settings below allow access to youtube.

*.youtube.com
*.ytimg.com
*.youtube.com/watch
*.googlevideo.com
Then following characters are considered separators:
./?&=;+
Every substring that is separated by the characters listed above is considered a token. A token can be any number of ASCII characters that does not contain any separator character or *. For example, the following patterns are valid:
*.yahoo.com   => Tokens are: "*", "yahoo" and "com" 
www.*.com     => Tokens are: "www", "*" and "com"
www.yahoo.com/search=*  => Tokens are: "www", "yahoo", "com", "search", "*"
Thanks all.


This thread was automatically locked due to age.
Parents Reply Children
  • If you're using URL Groups or Web Categories, while creating a new group with "site.com", not only the host domain will be blocked but It will also work as an wildcard.

    If you use "new.site.com" only the subdomain will be blocked.

    All of this applies on both Web Filtering and SSL/TLS Inspection Rules.

  • Hi

    As you know technology is like a living organism. Its always up to dated so it presents new features every day. So Sophos products family also precious member of this market.

    May you remind me the text as you mentioned from which help file. Which version did you contexted from.


    Is there any other ways to get the aimed result as;

    *watchlive.* > A rule syntax includes in the end of all the domain names which "watchlive" sentence in it.  

    0day*.* > A rule syntax includes in front of all the domain names which "0day" sentence in it.    

    If this essential feature is absent, that is sad.
    Thanks.

  • Thanks

    Yes in use of Web Categories. These cats are especially for english-spoken countries i'd say.
    So those pre-compiled lists could not satisfy the needs for non-english spoken zones.

    There are lots of new web sites appear like a plop every day for getting over the blockage of dmca or government censorship.
    So it is very hard to track the new domains via logs.
    Yes censorship occurs in these regions.


    if there is no wildcard method available is there any other way to get this kind of job done?
    Different approach; maybe via another mechanism..