Chapter 15 Unified Threat Management for FortiOS 5.0 : Web filter : Overriding FortiGuard website categorization : Using Alternate Categories
  
Using Alternate Categories
Rating Overrides
There are two approached to overriding the FortiGuard Web Filtering. The first is an identity based method that can be configured using a combination of identity based policies and specifically designed webfilter profiles. This has been addressed in the Firewall Handbook.
The second method is the system wide approach that locally (on the FortiGate Firewall) reassigns a URL to a different FortiGuard Category and even subcategory. This is where you can set assign a specific URL to the FortiGuard Category that you want to you can also set the URL to one of the Local Categories that you have created
The Rating Overrides option is available because different people will have different criteria for how they categorize websites. Even is the criteria is the same an organization may have reason to block the bulk of a category but need to be able to access specific URLs that are assigned to that category.
A hypothetical example could be that a website, example.com is categorized as being in the Sub-Category Pornography. The law offices of Barrister, Solicitor and Lawyer do not want their employees looking at pornography at work so they have used the FortiGuard Webfilter to block access to sites that have been assigned to the Category “Pornography”. However, the owners of example.com are clients of the law office and they are aware that example.com is for artists that specialize in nudes and erotic images. In this case to approaches can be taken. The first is that the Rating Override function can be used to assign example.com to Nudity and Risque instead of Pornography for the purposes of matching the criteria that the law office goes by or the site can be assigned to a Custom Category that is not blocked because the site belongs to one of their clients and they always want to be able to access the site.
Another hypothetical example from the other side of the coin. A private school has decided that a company that specializes in the online selling of books that could be considered inappropriate for children because of their violent subject matter, should not be accessible to anyone in the school. The categorization by Fortinet of the site example2.com is General Interest - Business with the subcategory of Shopping and Auction, which is a category that is allowed at the school. In this case they school could reassign the site to the Category Adult Material which is a blocked category.