DNS Reputation Exception

[Steven_Lucas]

I am trying to white-list a single domain for DNS Reputation prevents. Currently, it seems like the only option is to make exceptions for all of our DNS servers, effectively turning off DNS Reputation checks for DNS lookups in our company. 

The domain is a employee awareness training like for phishing that is publically available, so it technically is a phishing site and should not necessary be re-categorized, but we'd like to whitelist it for our company during our phishing tests.

Has anyone ever had to do this before? 

[PhoneBoy · Accepted solution]

Seems like you could create a custom application definition for said domains and create an exception for it in your Threat Prevention policy.
Something like this:

@Vladimir this might also be a solution to the thread you raised about this as well.

[Vladimir]

@PhoneBoy  perhaps this would work, if CHeck Point is the one blocking it.

When I've added KnowBe4 domains to the categorization exceptions, the problems persisted, so in my case this was the issue:

When querying the https.protected-forms.com from inside the network, I was getting "can't find" in nslookup:

Looking in Check Point for this query, we see that it detects it as the query for malicious domain, but it allows it:

Finally, looking at the public DNS resolver that the Domain Controller forwarding the queries to, (IBM's Secure DNS Service Quad 9):

I have reached out to KnowBe4 and they are working on whitelisting this domain with threat intelligence providers.

[bcsw222]

I know this is an old thread - but I've attempted to do this and haven't had any success.

I believe the issue is that Custom site/Applications only detect on ports 80/443/8080. Not DNS (port 53), which is what is being Prevented in the logs.

There doesn't seem to be a way to add additional Match-By criteria to custom site/applications in Check Point. I could add DNS to an existing App - but not a custom site/application.

Do you know if there's a way to get around this? I'll have to disable the AV protection on my Threat Prevention profile if I can't get exceptions working for these Microsoft Attack Simulation URLs.

[PhoneBoy]

Custom Application/Site objects use the settings for Web Browsing.
Those can be changed here (though adding DNS might result in a performance impact):

If you know the domains used, you can create FQDN Domain objects and use those in the exception (with service Any).
This assumes your gateway and clients resolve DNS the same.