Merrill Lynch (MER) Blocking CNBC.com On Company Computers (Screenshot) (MER)

Joe Weisenthal | Dec 2, 08 9:01 AM

Update: It's a technical glitch. See here.

Original post:We've heard of major banks blocking blogs or sites like Facebook, but this bizarre. Merrilll Lynch has apparently started blocking CNBC.com from work computers. An employee accessing the site is greeted with the follwing image. An insider was kind enough to snap a picture of the screen and pass it on. In case you can't read it, the site is considered unsafe or inconsistent with Merrill Lynch principles. The site is in the category of "Social Networking and Personal Sites".

If you're at Merrill can you bring up CNBC.com on your computer? We've asked the company for comment and will update accordingly.

CNBCblocked.jpg

 

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4 Comments

Clustercrap said:
CNBC works fine in the London office.
speck said:
I work in computer security for another fin svcs firm, and have seen this problem many times. For its web filtering, Merrill is using a third party product from Websense. Websense is responsible for classifying web sites into categories, and Merrill then just decides which categories to block instead of having to block or unblock every web site out there. Sometimes, Websense (and other companies like it) will mess up and accidentally block something they shouldn't. It will probably be fixed by tomorrow -- either Merrill with put in a special override for cnbc.com, or WebSense will fix the problem and distribute a new database of 'social networking' sites.
Guidoman said:
Why is the url section redacted?
@Guidoman
There were a series of numbers in the URL section, and I thought on the off chance that they could be used to identify the computer it was probably wise to just block it out.

We try to protect the anonymity of our informants.

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