So I guess it’s that time of the year, no more public holidays and a few more months till the Christmas holidays .. what better time to waste some time at work and see how many dodgey websites you can get to! If you can’t get to them, why not work out a way to get around the filters in place and teach your IT department a lesson (those commie bastards)!!
It’s always a pain in the ass for IT departments, especially if you’re a lean ship like where I work. We always seem to have staff rolling over for some reason and it’s hard to get a grip on things, then when you’ve been there the longest, it’s assumed that you’ll make sure everything is ship shape! The ISA server fits into this position. I’ve inherited someone elses bad setup, well, maybe not bad, but not a great setup with little thought into the web proxying side of things. Originally we had no way of reporting on individual users traffic, we solved this using some basic ISA log analysing software, which then brought to light what the users were actually doing. We could see the top users by traffic and requests, but it wasn’t until we could actually see what these people were doing that things started falling into place.
It now appears that quite a few people have taken it upon themselves in these “boring” times at work to find and use some proxy sites to get to facebook, youtube, bebo and the like. So, we don’t use any automated content filtering – YET, so we have to sort something else out. This is where I came across isaserver.bm, they have heaps of great things, but most of all they have links to updated xml files containing a bunch of proxy sites (as well as porn sites, gambling sites, chat sites etc). Go here to get straight to the xml files.
So all that you need to do once you get these files is submit your change request form (because we all do change control right?), import the xml files, then add them to your appropriate rule and sit back and watch the traffic. Hopefully this will catch a lot of the proxy sites (or whatever set you are using) and make your job a bit easier. I don’t know about you guys but I don’t have the time to sit there and go through the traffic for a thousand users or so!
Hope this helps someone, I know it helped me.
