Ultrasurf is a freeware Internet censorship circumvention tool that enables its users to bypass censorship and firewalls using HTTP proxy. It’s been around for several years already and has become very popular among students, since it allows them to trick web filters and browse their favourite websites on school machines.
I decided to spend some time playing with it, so the first thing I did was look at what people do with Ultrasurf. Searching in Google offered me two options:
What a surprise – people are looking at how to use it and, more importantly, how to block it. I tried using Ultrasurf and it took me just one double-click of my mouse to get it working and bypassing web filters. But I can’t say that protection from Ultrasurf is as simple as its usage. According to Google’s keyword tool almost 10,000 people are looking for Ultrasurf protection solutions every month. That’s quite a lot.
IT administrators spend days configuring their firewalls to block unwanted websites from their network, but Ultrasurf simply redirects all web traffic through proxy servers bypassing all those firewall rules. This results in a lot of headaches for IT support and information security departments.
There are not that many solutions available and even less of those that work. So, we decided to create a short video demonstrating a simple way to block Ultrasurf using Faronics Anti-Executable.
