Question

How to remove certain ips from Websense reporting

Asked by: coffeebrandy

I'm am trying to remove certain IPs from showing up in Websense reports. IPs like virus scanner updates and stuff like that. I don't need to see a list of 20 ips when I build a report for url history. Is there any way to remove these or just not monitor traffic to these certain IPs or websites?

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Asked On
2009-02-06 at 06:06:12ID24119209
Tags

websense

Topics

Network Software Firewalls

,

Miscellaneous Networking

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
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Answers

 

by: keith_alabasterPosted on 2009-02-07 at 02:55:22ID: 23577506

No. Websense, like the full-blown professional products such as ISA Server/ASA etc, are certified to meet international standards. having the ability to 'hack' the security logs - and therefore the reports that come out from them - would break that certification level.

Keith

 

by: decoleurPosted on 2009-02-07 at 17:05:43ID: 23581405

you can absolutely customize the reports to exclude and specifically defined traffic destinations or sources. this would not break any compliance requirements because they would not be excluded from the logs, although this could be considered reducing the noise from the repots I would be cautious about removing too much because even though ou know the WSUS server is going to hit Microsoft, I would filter that out specifically but not everything sourced from the WSUS server because it could be going to badplace.net and you wouldn't want to miss that in your reports...

hope this helps,

-t

 

by: keith_alabasterPosted on 2009-02-08 at 00:11:53ID: 23582613

I can see now that there are two views on this depending on how you 'translate' the original post-

One view is that the system must 'record' traffic passing through the firewall as I have said.

The second view is simply to design a report output based on what you want to see.  Sorry if you were asking on the second aspect.

 

by: coffeebrandyPosted on 2009-02-08 at 06:14:49ID: 23583656

Great,  so how can it be done?  I've tried everything

 

by: keith_alabasterPosted on 2009-02-08 at 06:24:49ID: 23583697

As it sounds like you are after the second perspective I am sure decoleur will be able to walk you through it

 

by: decoleurPosted on 2009-02-08 at 06:55:19ID: 23583817

clarifications always help...

after revisiting the docs on the websense reporter from http://kb.websense.com/pf/12/webfiles/WBSN%20Documentation/v6.3.2/English/WSE/ReporterUserGuide.pdf I think your best bet would be to either reclassify the known good sites that you do not want reporting on and exclude them in the category/risk classes tab or just exclude the categories that you do not want listed.
I was mistaken when I thought that that you could exclude running the report on specific known use cases, I work with so many competitve products in this space sometimes their capabilities bleed together.

hope this helps,

-t

 

by: coffeebrandyPosted on 2009-02-08 at 08:27:16ID: 23584224

I forgot to mention this is websense express.  I was a little confused when you mentioned websense reporter. I've figured out how to recategorize certain ip's but have not been able to exclude them from reporting or a specific report yet.

 

by: decoleurPosted on 2009-02-08 at 10:12:42ID: 23584826

It looks like in websense express you have to exclude the specific machines from being filtered.

Take a look at Excluding Servers from Filtering with Websense Express from http://kb.websense.com/al/12/1/article.asp?aid=2983&tab=browse&bt=4&r=0.1505368

Tutorial Overview:
Websense Express lets you exclude certain computers from filtering. This is commonly done for network servers and workstations whose traffic is well-defined, and should not be included in the Websense Log Database.

To exclude individual computers from filtering:
-In Websense Manager, go to Server > Settings.
-Select the NIC (network interface card) that is connected to your span port, and monitors traffic.
-Expand Network Agent in the navigation pane.
-Expand Global Settings > <IP address>.
-Select the NIC that monitors traffic.
-Click Monitoring to display the Monitor List dialog box.
-In the Monitor List Exceptions area, click Add.
-Enter a Single IP address, or enter an IP address range to be excluded from monitoring.
-Click OK to close the Add IP or Range dialog box.
-Click OK two more times, to close the Monitor List and Settings dialog boxes.


I think this will influence reports taken after the policy gets put into effect, records of filtering prior to exclusion will remain.

hope this helps,

-t

 

by: coffeebrandyPosted on 2009-02-09 at 05:52:48ID: 23589932

ya i've already filtered out the servers and stuff.  But still i need to get all the bittdefender, microsoft, citrix ip's removed from the reports.  gotomeeting alone hits like 20 ip's 100 times which just makes a mess out of reporting.

to me this would be no issue but it's for a client and he wants the reports simple

 

by: keith_alabasterPosted on 2009-02-09 at 10:32:30ID: 23592831

Can you not export the report to Excel, for example, and remove duplicates?

 

by: decoleurPosted on 2009-02-09 at 11:42:31ID: 23593586

I think Keith's suggestion is how you will probably need to go forward. Websense Express does not have the reporting capabilities of the enterprise version and so you will most likely have to massage the output that you are getting now. If you can come up with an easy way to identify the data that you want to cull out of the report you might be able to make a macro in Excel that could format the output so your customer could downlaod a report and then feed it to the macro to generate the deisred output. you could also use one of the pages in the workbook to identify the addresses you want pulled out of the final report. It would take a bit of work to set up but could give you a product that you could also sell as a value added service to other customers.

hope this helps,

-t

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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