Unclassified / Uncategorised Site Processing
An Unclassified or Uncategorised Site is a URL that is not yet listed in the Web Categories List and therefore does not have a category assigned for URL reputation.
To configure whether Unclassified Sites should be blocked by default, visit your USS Dashboard, and click Products ⟶ Web Security ⟶ Product Configuration.
When the USS Web Security product detects that an unclassified site has been requested, it will attempt automatic categorisation of the URL. If automatic categorisation is not possible, Web Security will fall back to a manual categorisation process.
There is no guarantee a URL will be categorised within a certain time period. For immediate and permanent categorisation, the URL should be added to a custom URL Category.
The process is as follows. The site www.nocat.com will be used to identify an Unclassified Site.
- User visits
www.nocat.comand the request is identified as an Unclassified Site e.g. it is not listed in the Web Categories List. - Site is blocked or allowed based on the global setting for Unclassified Sites.
- The URL is sent to the Unified Security Service URL reputation cloud service.
- The URL reputation cloud service performs automated testing of the URL - specifically:
- Fetch the web page content and scan for malware, then try and automatically determine categorisation using machine learning techniques. A confidence score is assigned.
- If the confidence score is high, the URL will be added to the automatically determined Web category. If the determined category is of high importance e.g. Malware, Illegal, Adult, etc then the URL will be inserted immediately into the Web Category List. If the determined Web category is of lower importance, it will be inserted over a period of 24 hours.
- If the confidence score is low (for example if the page does not contain much content, or simply shows a login page) then the URL will be added to the queue for manual review by a human. The priority is set based on the number of requests, e.g. popularity of the URL. If a URL becomes more popular, the priority will increase.
- Once the URL has been added to the Web Categories List either via automatic or human review, then it will be reviewed again for accuracy based on the priority of the Web Category going forwards.