Renaming executables - Lanschool

[maxymaxy]

We have begun our trial of LanSchool 7.4

 

Some students have figured out that if they rename an application to one

on the allowed list it will run e.g a multiplayer game like Soldier of

Fortune with an executable called: sof2mp-test.exe they renamed to

notepad.exe.

 

Is there a way to deal with this?

 

regards

Paul

[maxymaxy]

Just to reply to my own post...

 

LanSchool technical support responded very quickly to this question. The suggestion was that while it was difficult to stop renamed exes, it was better to stop them from being installed in the first place. The distributor in Australia suggested Faronics Anti executable. This will run 24/7 on the student netbooks (which they take home) even when they are not being controlled or monitored in the classroom. It will stop any exe from running that is not in its whitelist. I have used this before in a very 'hostile' environment and it remained undefeated. Therefore, games cannot be installed or run from a USB device.

[p858snake]

Are the laptops part of your domain? you could do the restrictions via hashes with group policy.

[maxymaxy]

We are stepping into unknown territory because the netbooks will be taken home and used by students on their own network. So screwing down security too much is going to be a problem. Students will also have plenty of time to try and bypass any policies we might try and set. So I am thinking that we have a whitelist for all the apps we are known to be using at school and then it doesn't matter if they have installed other undesirable apps once they step onto school property and they connect to the network. Zenworks can do this and so can Faronics AE.