Block Google Drive Downloads and Uploads

This article applies to our On-Premise Appliance Filter and Firewall product only, not to Cloud.

 

If you allow access to Google Drive, you can block users from downloading and uploading documents. When this is set up, users who try to download a file will see a Smoothwall Block page instead of the document.

Important

You can only block these features if you apply filtering from On-Premise Appliance, and only for the browser version of Google Drive, not the app.

  1. Create a Custom Category:
    • Add these items to the Domain/URL list:
      • To block downloads, add mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment and drive.google.com/drive/shared-with-me
      • To block uploads, add clients6.google.com/upload/drive
    • Add this to the URL Patterns box: ((?:drive|docs)\.google\.com\/.*export)
  2. Create a Web Filter policy for the Custom Category with Block as the Action.