Mastering pfSense

Example – using Snort to block social media sites

In Chapter 4, Using pfSense as a Firewall, we covered several examples of using pfSense firewall rules to block certain websites. It quickly became apparent that blocking websites with this method is easy when the website uses a single IP address, but when the website uses multiple IP addresses, it was problematic. If the website uses a fixed set of IP addresses, it is easy enough to create an alias for them and to make sure the rule blocks all addresses covered by the alias. Some popular social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook, however, are constantly updating the pool of IP addresses they use, thus rendering this method difficult to utilize, because unless we constantly update our ...