I had a user report that they were unable to access a talent scouting agency's website. I received additional information from them, and it appeared that the site was being blocked by the 'Games' category. I tried to access the site myself to confirm that. I used Chrome, and the site appeared normally to me. This was unusual, because I am also blocked from Game sites. I tried several hard refreshes, I confirmed from the page source code that Websense was correctly identifying me. I then tried using IE 11, and was promptly blocked under the 'Games' category.
This was beyond strange, so I used the Investigative Reports to figure out how Websense was categorizing the URL. Here are the results:
Allowed
15:33:42 encoretalent-hawaii.com Miscellaneous: Uncategorized
15:33:43 encoretalent-hawaii.com Miscellaneous: Uncategorized
15:33:46 encoretalent-hawaii.com Miscellaneous: Uncategorized
15:33:47 encoretalent-hawaii.com Miscellaneous: Uncategorized
15:33:54 encoretalent-hawaii.com Miscellaneous: Dynamic Content
Blocked
15:35:08 encoretalent-hawaii.com Games
I understand that the category can change as Websense investigates URLs and updates their filters. However, these different categories were identified over the course of a couple of minutes, on the same day.
Has anyone else seen this behavior before? Is this expected behavior? I expected that the category would remain the same between browsers, that it would be agnostic. Is that not the case? Any help or insight into this behavior would be appreciated.
Here's my Version information if it's needed:
| Unified Security Center build: | 7.7.0.59 |
| Web Security build: | 7.7.0.1483 |
| Thanks, | |
| FreelancerMSC |