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A Myspace Lockdown - Is It Possible?
Raxxon asks: "We (my business partner and I) were asked by a local company to help 'tighten up' their security. After looking at a few things we ran some options by the owner and he asked that we attempt to block access to MySpace. He cited reasons of wasted work time as well as some of the nightmare stories about spyware/viruses/etc. Work began and the more I dig into the subject the worse things look. You can block the 19 or 20 Class C Address Blocks that MySpace has, but then you get into problems of sites like "MySpace Bypass" and other such sites that allow you to bypass most of the filtering that's done. Other than becoming rather invasive (like installing Squid with customized screening setups) is there a way to effectively block MySpace from being accessed at a business? What about at home for those who would like to keep their kids off of it? If a dedicated web cache/proxy system is needed how do you prevent things like SSL enabled Proxy sites (denying MySpace but allowing any potentially 'legal' aspects)? In the end is it worth it compared to just adopting an Acceptable Use Policy that states that going to MySpace can lead to eventual dismissal from your job?"
I have customers who have asked us to do this, and we usually work to talk them out of it. As an employer myself, I have no problem with my employees "wasting time" on occasion, as long as their work is getting finished on time, and they're meeting their deadlines. Work takes more of our time than ever, so there is no reason why people can't take a recess for 5 minutes out of the hour to do personal things.
Nonetheless, the best solution that I came up with (I don't think I "invented" this, but I did come up with it after many days of contemplating) was to have a revolving DNS change for those 20 MySpace Class C addresses. We made it intermittent enough that the employees "thought" it was MySpace downtime, and eventually usage dropped significantly. Every 5-10 minutes a CRON job would add its own random address for one of the MySpace addresses, then 5 minutes later it cleared that and then did it to another address.
The only guy that I am aware of that noticed it is the guy who ran his own DNS on his workstation, but he was geeky enough to probably realize that it wasn't MySpace that wasn't resolving.
I still think that it is wiser to discuss WHY employees might be needing some downtime versus locking them out of applications. Happy employees are efficient, productive and fun to work with. I would never block my employees access to any sites (then again, I would never drug test, delve into their private lives, run a credit report, or any of the usual steps employers take).
I did something similar to this except I blocked all access to the internet and told everyone that a Myspace virus had crashed the server. Then I spent the afternoon sobbing in my office to make them feel really guilty.
Are you hiring? ;)
@HbFyo0$k8 tH!$
I make no personal statement about what people should or should not be able to access from work. From a professional POV, if the customer asks for it I discuss the pro's and con's of filtering vs. log auditing (the vast majority of actual employees i spoke to prefer filtering - they feel auditing is too invasive), and usually the customer goes for filtering. It is important to point out that there is no fool-proof solution, and filtering has significant limitations. Having said that, if your customers insists on going the filtering route, try Surfcontrol or Websense.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Any chance your looking for an IT Manager.
Seriously, I have left so many jobs simply because I wasn't happy being treated like a child. Give me a job and I do it, to the best of my ability... don't concern yourself with what I do when I'm not working, and certainly don't tell me that I am expected to spend every minute during business hours working.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
is there a way to effectively block MySpace from being accessed at a business?
Stop hiring teenagers?
yup. Sonicwall with thier CFS (content filter system). works like a dream.
Until somebody there goofs and flags the map image server for mapquest as porn (we are fighting that one now)
Luckilly they do have a user submission system to reclassify those goofs.
I worked at a place (~200 employees) that had a really crappy policy.
There were about 20 people in management type positions that had absolutely no blocks set on the websites that they could visit.
The rest of the employees had a whitelist of work related websites that they could access. Everything else was strictly verboten. No checking personal email, no checking the weather or news.
To me it seemed somewhat Draconian, but that was the policy in place.
God I'm glad I left that job.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
Install websense. Blocks the proxy sites AND Myspace as well as anything else you want.
It's better to be hated for who you are, than be loved for who you're not.
Assuming it is a windows environment, use policy/login scripts to update the hosts file on the client to map the myspace domains to yahoo, or something else harmless.
Squid+SquidGuard
.myspace.com
I had to do this for a school. Basically, set up Squid to act transparently. Set up an acl like:
acl myspace dstdomain
acl work_hours MTWHF 09:00-12:00
acl work_hours MTWHF 13:00-17:00
http_access allow myspace !work_hours
http_access deny myspace
That would allow access during lunch and before and after work.
If you want to block against proxies, use SquidGuard plus some blacklists. The ones at urlblacklist are good, as is the isakurldb list (it's based on dmoz). Another one is the one from shalla.de. All have social networking categories as well as proxy sites, though shalla's proxy and spyware lists tend to overblock.
I'd recommend merging urlblacklist's lists with isakurldb, and also shalla (but remove yimg.com from the redirector list manually) for both proxy and social networking. Then use SquidGuard to restrict the access.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
So block the class C's. Things like Myspace Bypass are not your problem, the average user probably won't know about that. At a certain point, you'll find a user who will just run an SSH proxy, and is it really worth the hassle for locking out the more advanced users like that?
I remember once being at some old ruined castle with my parents when I was, hmm, perhaps about 10 years old.
There was a small wooden fence around an area containing the moat and some potential dangerous ruined stonework.
I said: "what is the point of that fence, it's tiny, I could climb over it easily? it really doesn't do anything to stop me ending up in the moat"
They said: "well, the thing with fences is that they're not there to stop you getting somewhere. They're there to make you KNOW that you're not supposed to go somewhere. If you just fell into the moat, the castle owners are in trouble. If you climb over a fence and fall in the moat, the castle owners can say, 'well, come on, he climbed over the fence that clearly marked that area off limits. You can hardly blame us, and he can hardly claim he didn't realise he wasn't supposed to be going into that area'."
Likewise with your problem.
Yes, technical measures can always be defeated by the determined myspacer, such as via a proxy. However, I would say some technical measures are worth considering hand-in-hand with the AUP, as a sort of 'fence'. If myspace is banned by the AUP, but not blocked, then everyone will go there, and when they do, they can claim they didn't realise it was against the AUP, or they clicked a link which took them to myspace without realising that's where the link led, "honestly"... etc, etc.
If myspace is blocked, on the other hand, then you force people to "climb over the fence". Yes, they can still get to it via a proxy - but the fact they've gone to it via a proxy means it is explicitly, unarguably obvious that they knew they weren't supposed to be going there, and deliberately went out of their way to get around the rules. This, imho, means you will be able to enforce the AUP more stringently.
Bill Hicks put it best:
-Why aren't you working?
-'Cuz there's nothing to do.
-Why won't you pretend to be working then?
-Why won't YOU pretend that I am working? You are paid more than me, you fantasize.
Assuming your employees only "need" a finite, relatively small number of web site to do their jobs, why not approach this problem from the other direction and avoid a lot of the hassle.
Instead of trying to keep up with every potential "myspace bypass" and blocking every site like it, just block all access to the internet by default, and then allow them out into only those few sites they actually need.
I can't imagine actually working at a company that did this, I treasure my ability to mindlessly surf from time to time when I get stuck/bored, but I believe this would solve your issue. This way you'd only occasionally need to allow access to another "good" website, instead of trying to keep up with countless "bad" ones.
That's what the whitelist is for.
Amen to your policy. I started out in print design, and got my current skills ((X)HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, etc...) entirely through online tutorials and documentation. I write copy with the help of Reference.com, stop first at Wikipedia to learn the outline of any unfamiliar technology, and of course, keep up with tech news here. None of these sites were work-related when I worked in print, but they enabled me to move to web development.
And MySpace? I use it to keep up with old college friends. It's not directly productive, but it helps me avoid burnout. For those who use the full potential of the internet, restricting their access to it is like forbidding them from using a portion of their brain.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
I have no mod points, but I'm modding you up in spirit.
<soapbox>
I absolutely cannot stand it when employers filter content. The thing is, even if people are wasting too much time at work browsing MySpace (or the Internet in general), that is a management problem, not a technical one. If you take away their MySpace or whatever it is they're browsing, they're just going to move on and browse some other site. If you put a whitelist in place, they'll just find some other way to goof off. The problem isn't that the Internet is distracting, it's that the employee is easily distracted.
I work at a big company as a contractor. It just recently blocked access to the big Internet e-mail services (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.) because it didn't like employees wasting time with their personal e-mail at work. Of course, being a contractor, it doesn't take into account that I use my personal e-mail to communicate with my contract agency about stuff that I'd rather not have stored on company e-mail servers. It's easy to say, "Well, you shouldn't use company resources for that type of stuff," but practically speaking, my ability to communicate effectively with my contract agency is essential to me doing a good job for them. It also totally ignores the fact that I keep personal stuff like vacations and such on my personal Gmail calendar to know when I should ask for time off, when my coworker's birthday is, and so on.
The company spends a fortune on content filtering. There's the hardware itself, the update service, the support contract, the personnel cost for the guy who maintains it, the internal support costs of handling trouble tickets related to it, the cost of Internet downtime due to it periodically failing, the cost of packaging the software end of it and deploying it to the workstations (so that you can't browse them at home on your laptop, of course!), and so on ad nauseum. Just as one example, some of our customers are casinos. So we can't just put a rule in that says, "block gambling sites," because our marketing and sales folks have to be able to access their sites. No, we have to have rules that say things like, "This group can access these sites, that group can access those sites, everyone else can't access any of the sites, ..."
Even in the extreme case of porn sites, the answer to controlling it is to make a company policy prohibiting browsing them, and if you catch someone doing it, fire them for it. If you try to block them all, you're just setting yourself up for someone saying something like, "Well, it wasn't blocked, so I thought it was okay to go there!" I've found that if you treat people like 12-year-olds, they tend to not disappoint you. When policies like this go into place, you're also going to have the contingent of people who deliberately goof off more as a form of passive-aggressive rebellion. It's just stupid, you're only causing more problems, and there's no need.
I know that some of you will probably reply, "But you have to filter content to avoid sexual harassment lawsuits!" No, you don't. As long as you make a company policy about it and you take the appropriate action when someone breaks that policy, you'll win any lawsuit that someone may file. The law does not require you to spend a fortune to be a babysitter, it only requires that you take reasonable action to prevent a hostile work environment. The reason we have content filtering in the first place is because managers, in general, are lazy and don't want to do it themselves. The people who would sue you for not content filtering will sue you anyway. The only important thing is whether or not you'll win. Besides, at my company, the cost of defending itself against such frivolous lawsuits is negligible compared to the cost of maintaining our content filtering services.
Content filtering is no substitute f
Sniff passwords for anyone that logs into Myspace then sabotage their accounts. Declare this policy a couple of days before it takes effect.
Software patents delenda est.
This is exactly the reason I started smoking.
I was in the US Air Force at the time... and sitting idle in our office was a sure way to be given some mundane task to perform... so one had to look busy, or be outside having a smoke break.
In my office, the average smoke break was somewhere near 1 hour as our job was hurry up and wait. (ground computer maintenance for an aircraft based radar platform called AWACS). We could see the planes land, and the crew head in for debrief, from the "smoke pit"... so we were always there when real work needed doing.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
American Heritage Dictionary - Cite This Source
draconian (dr-k'n-n, dr-) Pronunciation Key
adj. Exceedingly harsh; very severe: a draconian legal code; draconian budget cuts.
Words evolve. Deal with it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I had an employer ask me to do this for them as well. Since it was a Windows AD environment, I just set the internal DNS server to point myspace.com to 127.0.0.1 and set DHCP to hand out only the internal DNS server, which is what you want in an AD environment anyways. Obviously, it'd be fairly easy to circumvent (manually plug in an ISP's DNS server - problem solved), but it kind of ties into that "fence" idea mentioned in an earlier reply here, in that, for someone to figure out why Myspace wasn't working, they'd need to troubleshoot it, at which point they'd discover where Myspace was pointing and realize, "Hmm, someone probably intentionally did that."
I will point out that this was for a smallish company (25 people), not a school or anywhere else where the end-user can basically be assumed to be at least somewhat malicious. But, it does get the job done if you're in a hurry.
Likewise, I would be suspicious of giving high sensitivity projects to employees to frequent lots of forum sites, as they might be more inclined to share things.
My, what an.. interesting point of view. So people who are more social are more likely to spill your secrets? The fact that someone likes to discuss things with people means that they are more likely to be telling everyone things you've asked them not to tell people?
Sorry, but I think that's absolute bunk. Knowing what to say and what not to say, what things are secret and what are public, is a large part of learning to be social in any medium. Frankly, I'd be more worried of people selected for such a policy, not less. At the very least, I'd never want to work with them.
"How fine you look when dressed in rage."
... better block Slashdot while you're at it.
Fire people that aren't doing their job.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
We filter heavily. Not any technical sites, but games, shopping, many message boards, and sex of course. Some blocked sites can be accessed using 1/2 hour discretionary time. Not the sex sites of course, but shopping and such-like. This is mandated statewide, and not up to the individual IT departments.
I work for Child, Youth and Family Development. We oversee the foster programs, youth activities, and detention centers. Even with all the filtering, we are investigating several net abuse cases per week. We have about 2,500 employees statewide. Most of the abuse cases are from the detention center guards.
All in all, I agree with filtering in this case. This is the state, and we are browsing on your dollar. Many state employees feel no compunction ripping off the tax payer through laziness or outright theft. I'm not one of them.
What do you all think? If you had a chance to vote on a ballot initiative (assuming your state is not one of those still stuck in the stone age and actually has ballot initiatives) mandating filtering for all state employees in your state, would you vote for or against?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Working for a .com, my company had a problem with people always checking fuckedcompany to see if we were on it, so the CTO resolved fuckedcompany.com to 127.0.0.1.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Locks only keep honest people honest.
If you block MySpace succesfully, the people who visit MySpace during their work time will just find another way to waste time and expose the company's computers to spyware/etc. risks. It's a losing battle. Think of it as DRM for your employee's time.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
First, we have limited bandwidth. People watching YouTube would seriously impact productivity. Second, the state being as it is, trying to discipline people for excessive usage would cost more than simply blocking access. Third, we deal with children. Having counselors downloading porn would look... bad. Fourth, we do not allow people to bring in novels to read during work hours, why should they be able to browse the web? Fifth, some of our employees were at one point in time our clients. They are still kids, and not very well socialized kids. They need boundaries.
Blocking access to unnecessary sites saves money by keeping our limited bandwidth free and helping to ensure that employees don't waste time.
How does the number of abuse cases we investigate per week compared to our number of employees tell you anything at all about whether we are wasting money or not? Did I mention what type of abuse cases were involved? Do you even know how we operate and what sorts of special conditions might apply to an agency such as ours?
Finally, why are you so angry? You're not that guy who has a beef against all child protection agencies everywhere because one took his kids away, are you?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton