BrightCloud missing the Plot!

[u7285]

Hi Guys and Gals

I see there is already multiple threads about mis-classification on URL categories! I am now pleading with Palo Alto to address this issue with BrightCloud!

To reduce the none business related websites we started blocking the "society" category.....  Now we are being flooded with incidents where busines related sites are being blocked.....  Sites like BMW.co.za is classified as society but bmw.com is correctly classified!!! Same goes for all other motor vehicle related sites!!! How can they mis this? It seems that if Brightcloud uses the society category as default??

We have been getting arount the problem by adding sites to the allow list and creating custom categories, but this is becoming an administrative hell. We have also reported each URL with Brightcloud, but with amount of url's that we sending we are at the point where Brightcloud will need to put us on their payroll!! - hehehe

Please advise if someone has the same problem and if Brightcloud will address the problem?

[u7285]

Hi Doris

Thank you for your replies.... We understand the processes Brightcloud uses, but still we cannot afford the time\manpower to build their database for them. I Think it would have been valid if all Categorization engines was having the same major issues then yes... we have no other choice, but there are better engines out there and if Brightcloud is going to continue to be a sub-standard engine then it will most definitely have a negative impact on Palo Alto sales.  At this we have halted all Palo Alto Sales as we simply cannot handle the extra work created by the Bright Cloud engine....  Don't get me wrong here... Palo Alto is a GREAT product, It simply need to focus on fixing the URL categorization engine. Enjoy!

[keklund]

We've also seen more and more of this - 'society' is essentially a worthless category.  Every new proxy site seems to fall there, and is allowed until the app detection catches up.

We need to have 'society' open because we are an educational institution.

BrightCloud was touted as an improvement over SurfControl, and it was at the beginning.  Now I constantly have to answer questions on why certain sites are blocked and certain sites are allowed.

We bought this product specifically because we wanted to stop playing whack-a-mole :smileyangry:

[lardsa]

I agree, Brightcloud must improve their system, I send a minimum of 4 URLs per week and I noticed some URLs are back to their old/wrong category after some time.

[dmarion]

I'm planning on rolling out some url filtering for security purposes.

My goal is to give users a continue page when they navigate to a URL that falls into one of the following categories; bot-nets, confirmed-spam-sources, spam-urls, malware-sites, spyware-and-adware, unconfirmed-spam-sources, or fishing-and-other-fraud.

I'm from the edu space, so I can't block everything, but I was wondering if anyone has had success in filtering out the bad url's? I see posts like this and I start second guessing myself.

[Laforgepaul]

I can say that this part works very well on our PAN devices.  We do a hard block on malicious URLs and  custom continue pages on categories that are against our policies.  We haven't ran into many issues with this feature.