Websense is blocking my application on some laptops (I think)

Dr Pepper

Hi All,

I have a free-standing Java application. It includes an automatic updating and and online 'activation' features which require access to the internet to work. This all works fine on the vast majority of computers but some people with HSE laptops (and possibly others) are having problems. I think they use a web filtering application called Websense. Unfortunately, I don't know anybody with a HSE laptop that I can use for testing so finding a solution is proving to be fairly tricky.

Does anybody have experience with this type of problem? Is there any way around this type of filtering software. To be honest, I'm not sure if my application is being blocked or if it's the URLs I'm using, although I haven't heard of anyone not being able to access my website in a browser so it must be the application.

I'm not sure if the regular user has access to application whitelists in their security (or if they would have to ask an IT Admin to do that).

By the way, my application is installed on customers computers using Inno Setup (installer) and it is run using launch4j with an embedded JRE. It does not require admin privileges to install/run (installs to user's Application Data directory - not Program Files).

Any light that you can shed on this would be helpful.

Cheers,
Brian

stevenmu

You could give some users the specific URL that you use for updating and see if they can browse to it?

The users are also presumably behind a proxy server, which may require some form of authentication, does your updater support this?

Raging_Ninja

Are any warnings or errors being generated on the client event viewer?

Dr Pepper

Thanks for the replies.

stevenmu - No, my updater does not support authentication.

Raging_Ninja - If there are error details, I haven't seen them yet. Forgive my ignorance but are you talking about the Windows EventViewer?

I am currently working on a simple test application that I will send the user. This application tries to get web pages via http from a variety of URLs, also a couple of file downloads, an FTP connection and transfers, http GET/POST requests, https. I'm hoping to run that test application on Monday and I will report back with the results.

Blowfish

Websense is a proxy which blocks URLs based on categorisation. You can find what it actually categorises your URLs as by sticking them into Virustotal, then once analysed click on 'Additional Information'. Once you have the category, you'll need to get their InfoSec guys to either reclassify it if it's wrong or to whitelist it.

Dr Pepper wrote: »

I am currently working on a simple test application that I will send the user. This application tries to get web pages via http from a variety of URLs, also a couple of file downloads, an FTP connection and transfers, http GET/POST requests, https. I'm hoping to run that test application on Monday and I will report back with the results.

You are better off getting them to browse to it via browser. By default Websense will redirect them to a page saying it's blocked and what it's blocked under. This is what the block page looks like by default.

I'd imagine your FTP connection could be an issue, as FTP ports are blocked for a lot of orgs.

Dr Pepper

Wow. Great! Thanks very much for that info Blowfish.

Blowfish

No problem. I actually only spotted the thread after alt+tabbing to boards while waiting for a Websense report to complete