WSA blocks by catagory even with website in whitelist

[isobig001]

We have been having issues lately with our WSA. A user requests access to a website that is currently blocked, we add it to the whitelist but it is still being blocked by a catagory. The previous issue was blocked by catagory "food and drink" and now this one is blocked by "Parked Domains". The "food and drink" one resolved after a couple weeks. I assume the site got recatagorized during that time. So instead of waiting for that to happen with this "Parked Domains" one and others that are sure to pop up in the future.... what can be done to avoid this?

I would think that putting the website in the whitelist would bypass any catagory blocking but it doesn't seem to be the case. Any advice is highly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Atazazuddin Shaikh]

Good Morning

Thanks for reaching out, I would recommend to open a TAC case so we can assure CIWUC signatures are getting updated correctly and review the categories etc.

you can also check the URL categories here:

https://securityhub.cisco.com/web/submit_urls

Thanks

Zack

[Siddharth Rajpathak]

Hello,

Your understanding is correct, adding a domain to a custom URL category should override the pre-defined categories.

Since the access is still being blocked by a pre-defined category, I suspect that the "whitelist" custom URL category is not being matched.

May I know if you added entries like example.com & .example.com in the whitelist for the domain?

If possible, could you please share the configuration of the whitelist category for the concerned domain and access logs when the website gets blocked by "Parked Domains" category?

Sid