Web content filtering would be a useful security control, if certain admins didn’t block the Uncategorized category… Lots of cool apps like to use fresh domains. Filtering used data from Cyren, but later moved to NetStar. Both of them have significant categorization issues.
Fortunately it’s only implemented in browsers using a process allowlist, so I found a few bypasses. curl is an obvious one if you don’t need a UI. Or in 2025, you could just download Chrome for Testing and rename chrome.exe.
That was patched (early 2026 I think) by using PE VersionInfo instead of file name - so you can just rcedit-x64.exe chrome.exe --set-version-string "OriginalFilename" check-your-signatures.exe.
Incidentally, writing this is how I found out rcedit is abandoned. So I wrote a replacement that also fixes lots of bugs. Go check it out here.