How to Verify/Test URL Category in GUI

Details

There is an option to allow users to verify/test the URL categorization used from the GUI under Objects > Security Profiles > URL Filtering Profile. This is handy to check while troubleshooting an issue or while configuring new URLs to determine what category needs to be allowed or blocked.

Depending on the URL filtering license that is activated, this link will open a web page to the BrightCloud or Palo Alto Networks website verification tool.

• The URLs are as follows:
  • BrightCloud's URL Test Site:
    • http://www.brightcloud.com/tools/url-ip-lookup.php
  • Palo Alto Networks URL Test site:
    • https://urlfiltering.paloaltonetworks.com/
• URL categorization can still be verified from the CLI with the following command below:

  • admin@myNGFW> test url yahoo.com
    yahoo.com internet-portals (Base db) expires in 93000 seconds
    yahoo.com internet-portals (Cloud db)
    admin@myNGFW>

• There are several Palo Alto sites available to customers to test the categories for PANDB:
  • http://pandb.paloaltonetworks.com/test-malware
  • http://pandb.paloaltonetworks.com/test-phishing
  • http://pandb.paloaltonetworks.com/test-(replace with category)

• For the category that contains space characters, replace the space character with a hyphen. For example, for the "Recreation and Hobbies" category, the link will be:
  • http://pandb.paloaltonetworks.com/test-recreation-and-hobbies
  • Must be all lowercase. Otherwise, a 404 error is returned.