topic Re: Marijuana Site URL Classification in Canada after Legalization in Firewall and Security Management

Marijuana Site URL Classification in Canada after Legalization

Aidan_Luby — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 14:15:23 GMT

Canada recently legalized Recreational Marijuana use but our firewall is still categorizing marijuana sites as "Illegal Drugs" in our App/URL Filtering policy causing them to be blocked. I was wondering if CheckPoint can re-categorize sites with the tag Marijuana as to not be also categorized as Illegal Drugs for your customers in Canada.

Currently the only requests we've gotten to make these exceptions so far have come from our HR Department which is trying to stay up to date with policy regarding the Marijuana Legalization.

Re: Marijuana Site URL Classification in Canada after Legalization

PhoneBoy — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 18:45:55 GMT

Several states in the US have also legalized recreational use of marijuana, though it is still illegal at the federal level.

The politics of that are better left to a different forum

As far as I know, we don't have an explicit tag for sites related to Marijuana.

If you tag these sites manually and create an allow rule before your one that drops sites related to illegal drugs, it should work, though.

Re: Marijuana Site URL Classification in Canada after Legalization

Aidan_Luby — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 18:52:05 GMT

I can see if there was disagreement between provinces and the federal government, but this is a country-wide change, I find it hard to believe the database cannot be granular enough to change settings like that per country.

Also as you have shown above there is literally a tag for Marijuana already, which is why I thought this would be easily doable.

I have done what you've done above already but I prefer to have the centralized CheckPoint databases make changes when I think it makes more sense than needing one off changes in my own rulebase

Re: Marijuana Site URL Classification in Canada after Legalization

PhoneBoy — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 19:04:54 GMT

We do not have a tag/category for sites specific to Marijuana.

I actually created it, which you can do as follows:

Then you can create custom applications/sites that leverage that tag:

The URL database and related categorizations are global in nature.

Unfortunately, I am not aware of a mechanism for us to say that Marijuana-based URLs are not considered "Illegal Drugs" inside the country of Canada only.

You can override locally as I described.

Re: Marijuana Site URL Classification in Canada after Legalization

Aidan_Luby — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 19:47:35 GMT

We have this category, I don't think it's custom:

The CheckPoint URL Categorization page seems to reflect this:

I just thought the two categories seen above could be "decoupled".

Re: Marijuana Site URL Classification in Canada after Legalization

PhoneBoy — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 20:09:43 GMT

That's what I get for playing around in Demo Mode

In any case, you should still be able to create the rules like I described (create an allow rule for marijuana sites before the drop rule for Illegal Drugs).

Re: Marijuana Site URL Classification in Canada after Legalization

Agent_Smith — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 13:51:11 GMT

Site category needed for cannabis only.

Re: Marijuana Site URL Classification in Canada after Legalization

Chris_Atkinson — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 04:25:30 GMT

Could you clarify please, cannabis as separate to the existing marijuana category or something else?