1. A method comprising: maintaining, by a general purpose processor, a page directory and a page table within a system memory accessible by the general purpose processor, the page directory and the page table containing therein directory entries and page table entries, respectively, that are used to translate virtual addresses to physical addresses within a physical address space of the system memory; offloading, by the general purpose processor, content scanning of a content object to a hardware accelerator coupled to the general purpose processor by storing content scanning parameters, including the content object and information regarding a type of the content object, to the system memory using one or more virtual addresses and indicating to the hardware accelerator that the content object is available for content scanning; responsive to said indicating, the hardware accelerator: translating the one or more virtual addresses to one or more corresponding physical addresses based on one or both of the page directory and the page table; accessing the content scanning parameters based on the one or more corresponding physical addresses; scanning the content object for undesired content by applying a plurality of signatures against the content object based on the type of the content object; and returning a result of the scanning to the general purpose processor by writing the result to the system memory.