Excel & Flash Games

[richard.thomas]

Here the kids embed them in PowerPoint, Everytime we delete them they come back. I don't mind them having games in their area s'long as they don't come asking for more space and the games are still there.

[dchapman]

I disabled all activeX items in office documents (office12.adm) from Group Policy

User > MS Office 2007 system > security > Disable all ActiveX

seems to have annoyed the little rats

[L.E.K]

A new craze that is going on at my school as well is that the Year 9's have done HTML on there ICT work. Now they they are saying that they are just doing HTML work at lunchtimes and they are allowed to place games on there HTML pages to test them but they use this as an excuse just to play the games.

L.E.K

[dsm]

We fixed this when we came across the problem by using the sysinternals strings command to search for xls files containing a particular string (i imagine it was .swf).

You can just leave it running against your pupil user areas. Because it's only looking at xls files and the spreadsheets they make tend to be tiny it's pretty quick.

UPDATE: Here's the batch file contents.. change paths as necessary

@cd /d "e:\user data"
"E:\Batch Files\strings.exe" -s *.xls | findstr \.swf > "E:\Batch Files\XLS-GameSearchOutput.txt"

This is great but can we take this to the next step? How can I add a command to automatically delete any files that the batch file finds?

[kennysarmy]

I can't get it to work

I get the following errors?

FINDSTR: Line 1267379 is too long.
FINDSTR: Line 2314597 is too long.
FINDSTR: Line 3600147 is too long.
etc

anyone?

[Azhibberd]

As stated earlier the best bet is if ur using either office 2003 or above you can block all the games they put in office by blocking all activex with a simple GPO, although if your like us and can't afford the liscenes we moved to open office, This doesn't allow the use of flash anyway so that fixed that, and well for the internal flash games, we have abtutor control and just blocked all .swf and just removed that rule when they actually had a flash class.

[bizzel]

If you have the files still, please send me a copy of them! I'm creating definitions for EduSweep 2 to pick up exactly this kind of thing. If you could mail then to paul.beesley{at}durham.ac.uk that'd be brilliant.

[Azhibberd]

bizzel just sent you a link to them all as a pm

if you want some more of the actually flash files etc that we commonly see on are network let me know and i can throw them to you once i'm in tomorrow.

[Gatt]

Will send you a zip later with all the flash & excel games we have encountered so far..

[ABennett]

Does anyone have the hashes? Seems a FRP hash rule would do the job?

I am using Server 2003 Active Directory, in the Software Restrictions part of the policy element, go to the Additional Rules part, select the Hash Rules. This lets you browse to the file you want the Hash of. Don't forget to make sure the extention, in this case SWF, is in the designated file types.

[chazzy2501]

sahmeepee thanks for the tip, I've run this on just my 08's and have found 6 copies of the document "Bloodyday". of course the beauty with this method is it can be named anything!

Thats 4 pupils added to the banned users in ISA!

I'm not updating to 2007 as it's crashed so badly on me that I was forced to re-install the os -- on more than 1 occasion!

[James2k]

What we do here is if we spot a kid playing them we use ABTutor Disable Excel.
Then share the screen and use the Keyboard and delete the xls files...

If you don't wanna go down this route, Get your head of ICT to understand the problem the teachers are going to be facing and set out a policy about it. Here we did have a policy that if any pupil was caught playing them they were banned for 24 hours. With no exceptions. The amount of kids getting blocked was staggering. But they stopped. :-D

Also do a search on your server space once in a while for xls files and you will find them..

I was asked to restore a pupils files the other day and when I was having a browse through the folders found 22 games in there documents... They made there way to the recycling bin .... ;-)

[sahmeepee]

I can't get it to work

I get the following errors?

FINDSTR: Line 1267379 is too long.
FINDSTR: Line 2314597 is too long.
FINDSTR: Line 3600147 is too long.
etc

anyone?

(I know this is an old post)

You will get those errors from time to time during the scan. They can be ignored - they just mean that there is a big chunk of binary data being scanned without any carriage returns / linefeeds in it. If the scan turns up nothing, there may be nothing to find!

This is great but can we take this to the next step? How can I add a command to automatically delete any files that the batch file finds?

Yes, that's possible, but it's not something I'm going to post on here, because I can't be certain that it won't kill valid excel files. I did make a version that (reversibly) tweaked the data in the files to disable the SWF by corrupting its header. The most devilish part being that the pupil could see the SWF content very briefly when the file opened and then it'd just go white. Muhaha.

[Stuart_C]

I disabled all activeX items in office documents (office12.adm) from Group Policy

User > MS Office 2007 system > security > Disable all ActiveX

seems to have annoyed the little rats

This worked perfectly for me. Took a bit longet for the complaining to stop. The only problem is that, depending on the setup of your OU's, you may need to have a policy to turn it back on for techers... *Shakes fist in air and screams* Curse you Boardworks and your Flash embeded powerpoints!!!

[ShaunJohnson]

We fixed this when we came across the problem by using the sysinternals strings command to search for xls files containing a particular string (i imagine it was .swf).

You can just leave it running against your pupil user areas. Because it's only looking at xls files and the spreadsheets they make tend to be tiny it's pretty quick.

UPDATE: Here's the batch file contents.. change paths as necessary

@cd /d "e:\user data"
"E:\Batch Files\strings.exe" -s *.xls | findstr \.swf > "E:\Batch Files\XLS-GameSearchOutput.txt"

This is a little gem!!

Can anyone comment on whether this works for all office documents? Im looking to run it over office 2000 + 2003 + 2007 documents.

Thanks,
Shaun