Excel & Flash Games

[Gatt]

OK this is the latest craze to hit the school

 

Pupils embedding Flash games (eg PacMan, Sonic, etc) inside Excel Spreadsheets - making it virtually impossible to find them unless they give them names like "pacman.xls"

 

Does anyone know how to disable flash within Excel? I know its an ActiveX control, but I can only find out how to disable every ActiveX object and not specific (eg Shockwave Flash)

[Geoff]

This is possible in Office 2007 but not any prior version AFAIK.

[Gatt]

Bugger

 

Moving to 2007 in September so will try and get it sorted then

[tom_newton]

Well worth searching your drives for .xls over a certain size - have a look at some "average" dox, I bet you could come up with a decent guess easily enough

[tom_newton]

Suggestion #2: Look for xls with the same name appearing loads - sure someone could do vbs for this, afraid i'm a perl/shell sort of guy :-P

 

Suggestion #3: Block downloads of .xls

[Ric_]

This is possible in Office 2003 too Geoff... had a spate of this a couple of weeks ago and came down HARD on the pupils!

 

The foolish kids didn't rename the files so a search for sonic.xls, pacman.xls and others was very fruitful.

[Craig_W]

I've just found Sonic(1).xls on a teachers home drive!! Probably gives it to the kids!!

[Silvor]

Hi All,

 

Has anyone reached a solution with this? It's just hit our school (took them a while to pick it up though) and we're having trouble blocking it etc. We can't block downloads of XLS or DOC...

[tomscaper]

The best i could do regarding this was to keep a copy of it myself and do a search for *xls on the student drive and compare file sizes. Sometimes you can find them straight away as they rename pacman.xls to dfdhdkdfkd.xls how original, but some are clever and rename it to it coursework.xls.

It is long winded but it better than searching them one by one. Other than that i have no idea.

Again it should be the teachers watching the kids are not playing games in lessons. But they tend to be far to busy drinking there tea.

[Joanne]

I'm always deleting these damn falsh games. They just copy them back over from their flash drives though. Doing searches for large excel files is the best bet... open any that might not be games to check (just in case).

 

Also... make sure you have a good backup incase you get delete key happy like I sometimes do! hehe.

[Joanne]

the sonic one is over a meg for peoples info

[tomscaper]

if they have there usb drives connected you can create a shared in the computer management to that drive on the computer and delete the games off. But i would never do that tho.

[tomscaper]

if your interested here are the names and sizes

[Geoff]

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

[sahmeepee]

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"

[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.