SWF

[Oaktech]

Not sure if this should be here or in the exchange thread... Mods, feel free to move to wherever!

 

We are having massive issues with kids bringing in flash games and playing them in class, either from memory sticks or from their email. We can't block flash on the machines as it's part of their ICT work, but we have banned it on the filtering.

 

Can anyone think of a way that I can prevent the kids passing the games around via email, or starting them from sticks without interrupting their ability to pass round/start legitimate work?

[AngryTechnician]

I never found a technical solution to this, so we now use a system called 'class supervision'. Don your finest flame proof jacket and ask SMT if they've heard of it.

[Oaktech]

I never found a technical solution to this, so we now use a system called 'class supervision'. Don your finest flame proof jacket and ask SMT if they've heard of it.

 

Yeah... this is what I thought, and so far, flameproof suit or not it has fallen on deaf (or selectively incapable) ears.

 

Buggrit.

[sparkeh]

I never found a technical solution to this, so we now use a system called 'class supervision'. Don your finest flame proof jacket and ask SMT if they've heard of it.

Ah yes. Reminds me of a conversation with a teacher last week:

 

Teacher: "Why was Little Johnny allowed to do XYZ in the computer suite?"

Me: "My thoughts exactly"

T: "Eh?"

M: "Why was he allowed to do that in a lesson?"

 

The swf thing requires a non-technical solution.

[themightymrp]

Same problems here, never did find a solution At least, not a technical one! A better one we have is games embedded into Excel files!! Lost track of the times I've seen kids playing Sonic the Hedgehog inside Excel?! Not even sure how they do it to be honest

[AngryTechnician]

Not even sure how they do it to be honest

My money is on embedding a flash game as an OLE object.

[themightymrp]

Aye probably. It basically means we're screwed when it comes to blocking them though - I think I may be shot if I blocked Excel lol

[Mark182]

Anyone ever solve students playing .swf games?

[Oaktech]

not toally, but we certainly disrupted them...

 

Firstly we removed flash from everywhere that wasn't involved in teaching flash

 

Secondly we added files with no extension, or with swf extension to the email blocked list

 

Thirdly we removed the ability for students to download flash by blocking it on our firewall/filter

 

Fourthly every week I set a search to crawl student areas for specific file sizes, such as 88kb for cubefield, 126kb for linerider, 13256kb for 13 days in hell and delete them.

 

The kids pretty much gave up.

[Mark182]

Thanks, not to different to what we are doing. Just talking up abit of time!

[3s-gtech]

If you use USBDLM to assign your preferred drive letters, you can use Software Restriction Policies on the specified drive letters, e.g.

 

J:\*.swf

J:\*.zip\*.swf (for Flash files inside zip archives)

 

I don't currently have it in place for swf files, but it's there for .bat, .exe and .cmd.

 

I know there have been cases in the past of this failing to stop highly nested files, but I've found it pretty reliable using newer versions of GP. I also have a GP which blocks the Flash plugin from running, that's great fun.

[Arthur]

If you use USBDLM to assign your preferred drive letters, you can use Software Restriction Policies on the specified drive letters

With the Enterprise editions of Windows, you don't even need USBDLM to do this.

 

AppLocker's %HOT% path variable covers all removable storage devices regardless of drive letter.

[3s-gtech]

That's pretty cool. We don't have Enterprise on all PCs (about 25% on Pro) so didn't look into it at the time.

[clareq]

There is a program on here which I have on my network - whenever a flash game is run which it hasn't seen before it copies it to a location on a server. You add the hash of that file to a blocklist, and the program closes any file it find with a hash on that list within 5 seconds of it starting. It works really well, in combination with blocking swf e-mail attachments and a regular trawl of user areas for swf files.

 

here it is: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/security/69318-gamekiller-2-5-release-bug-fixes-extra-features-etc.html

Edited November 27, 2014 by clareq