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Skyhigh Security

URL Categorization and Rating

The TrustedSource database uses categories to organize similar types of URLs into groups based on the content of the webpage. For example, www.skyhighsecurity.com, www.mcafee.com and www.webwasher.com are grouped into the Business category. Sometimes, one URL is in more than one category because of overlapping content.

When URLs are submitted, lookups are performed in the local Secure Web Gateway database or using the Global Threat Intelligence service for an “in-the-cloud” lookup to assign them to particular categories and rate them for their web reputation. The data is sent each time an in-the-cloud lookup for web categorization or reputation is performed for a URL.

Skyhigh Secure Web Gateway applies ML/AI to identify sites to classify in various categories. The ML/AI approach includes taking lexical, domain, and web page features into consideration. 

  • Lexical features (URL based) - include the way a URL is crafted, the URL length, the number of dashes, semicolons, underscores, question marks, ampersands in the URL.
  • Domain features (host based) - include if it is a new domain, presence of named server, per IP, seen in previous category specific usage, etc.
  • Webpage features - include extracting and analyzing text from pages, for example links to images and other resources. It also can include a text analysis on the page itself. This is overlaid with a machine learning model that will extract knowledge from previous pages as test bed and will apply the analysis to new pages in an unattended way.

Data collected for URL Categorization and Rating

The following types of data are collected for URL categorization and rating.

  • Product name, for example, SWG
  • Version number, for example, 7.5.0
  • Customer ID as specified in the license information
  • HTTP Referer Header
  • HTTP User Agent Header
  • ID of the appliance that Secure Web Gateway  is running on (UUID)
  • URL that was submitted by a user

This does not include user name and password (if contained in the URL).

Disable data collection for URL Categorization and Rating

You can disable the collection of data about URL categorization and rating by disabling in-the-cloud lookups on the user interface of Secure Web Gateway.

  1. Select Policy > Settings.
  2. Under Engines > URL Filter select the URL Filter settings you want to disable in-the-cloud lookups for.
  3. Under Rating Settings deselect the following two checkboxes one after another:
    • Enable the Dynamic Content Classifier if GTI web categorization yields no result (NOTE: you can find out what the expected result should be by using https://trustedsource.org)
    • Use online GTI web reputation and categorization services if local rating yields no result
  4. Click Save Changes.

URL Review Ticketing System

Skyhigh supports an online tool to review if a site is categorized appropriately. You can submit the URL for review if you think it is not categorized appropriately. It may take around 3-5 business days to address these requests and may be extended if the review needs more time. If you don't get any responses, contact Skyhigh Security Support. For more details, see FAQs for Web Categorization and Reputation Lookup.

Do the following to submit a request:

  1. Go to https://trustedsource.org.
  2. Select the required Web Gateway On-prem/ Cloud from the drop-down list.
  3. Type in the URL of a website that needs to be reviewed, for example www.testsite.com, then click Check URL.
  4. Optionally, select up to three categories for the site and provide additional information in Optional categorization suggestion.
    Submits the URL for review.

NOTE: Make sure to provide additional information to justify the incorrect rating. Share the changes you made to a site if you own a website, which might impact the rating.

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