Websense not filtering XXX

[MalekoUK]

This morning a student found out that if you go to Google and search XXX and hit images you get a nice selection of adult images, some of which we found link to a .xxx domain and are not blocked! - If you search other 'adult' words or phases they are filtered via the Strict search filtering, so just seems to effect xxx.

 

We raised a support case to websense and they made is a Severity case and soon we received a phone call saying that we would need to filter SSO encrypted traffic, which is something they couldn't do over the phone as we may have to pay more for an upgraded package - we use Triton Hosted Cloud Security at the moment.

 

Does anyone else know anything about this? WHY is it only in Google that xxx is not filtered. Other words are and also Bing doesn't show any results from xxx either.

 

We are getting frustrated with websense as our renewal is going through soon and that has also gone up by £1500 - that was after a lot of negotiating!

[IrritableTech]

If I understand your problem correctly it may be due to the fact that google would prefer your search to be encrypted. Your connection to google over https can't be inspected like a connection over http. Filters can only see where the certificate is issued from (in this case google) but can't see what the packet includes (the search terms). So google is allowed in your filter, and the search can happen.

 

Google have created the nosslsearch.google.com subdomain, which with a bit of DNS trickery can ensure your users do not search over SSL - resulting in a correctly filtered set of results.

 

Option 3 on this page talks about nosslsearch... https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/186669?hl=en

 

Sorry if I've misunderstood the issue.

[MalekoUK]

That all makes sense, and it appears that our current package will not filter anything over SSO... Will have to look at DNS.