A wholesaler for brewery, winery and distillery equipment installs a web proxy with content control after malware incidents. Soon staff complain that business websites, above all the customers' own sites, are blocked. What went wrong?

The proxy is fed automatically with a blacklist maintained by its vendor, a US security company, and that list blocks not only known malware sites but the whole category "Drugs", which covers practically the company's entire customer base of breweries and distilleries. The tool was installed, but nobody adapted it to the business it protects.

* The vendor's category list blocked the malware sites and the customers' sites alike. *

The management's view was "great, it protects and makes little work". The users' view was that they could no longer do their jobs. A vendor's category list encodes the vendor's idea of unwanted content, in this case from a market where alcohol sites fall under "drugs", not the needs of a particular company. The result is low acceptance of the whole measure, which is a security problem in its own right, as the next card shows.

Go deeper:

• Internet filter (content-control software) — Wikipedia — category lists, blacklists and their side effects.