Anonymizing investigative reports

Administrator Help | Forcepoint Web Security and Forcepoint URL Filtering | v8.5.x

If you want to prevent identifying information from appearing in investigative reports, you have several options.

The most absolute method is to prevent the logging of user names, source IP addresses, and hostnames. In this case, no user-identifying information is recorded in the Log Database, making it impossible for investigative or presentation reports to include the information. See Configuring how requests are logged for instructions.

If some administrators need access to reports that include user information, but other administrators should never see user information, use delegated administration roles to control reporting access. You can configure roles to grant access to investigative reports, but hide user names in reports. See Delegated Administration and Reporting for details.

If you sometimes need to generate reports that contain user information, but sometimes need to generate anonymous reports, use the Anonymous option at the top of the Investigative Reports page to hide user names and, optionally, source IP addresses temporarily, as described below.

The Anonymous option

By default, clicking Anonymous hides only user names, continuing to show source IP addresses in reports. You can configure investigative reports to instead hide both user names and source IP addresses when Anonymous is selected:

On the management server, open the wse.ini file in a text editor. (By default, this file is located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Websense\Web Security\webroot\Explorer.)

Add the following line under the [explorer] heading:

encryptIP=1

Save and close the file.

Now, any time you click Anonymous, all user-identifying information is hidden.

When you click Anonymous, and then move to a different view of the data, such as detail view or outliers, user names remain hidden in the new report. However, to return to the summary view with the names hidden, you must use the links at the top of the report, not the breadcrumbs in the banner.