PVS and Facebook Game Detection

Keeping Your Workforce Productive

Companies maintain IT resources and hire employees to further their business. Invariably, employees will take breaks or look to cut corners when they think no one is looking. In today’s networked world, those breaks frequently take the form of web surfing or personal email. Many companies allow such behavior, within reason, as it boosts morale and helps keep employees from burning out. However, at times, lines are crossed and an employee may be using too much time for personal needs. It is important for a company to be able to monitor this in order to enforce an acceptable balance between work and breaks.

Tenable’s Passive Vulnerability Scanner (PVS) is able to detect a wide variety of Web-based games, including ones found on Facebook. Such games are often a "quick indulgence" where the employee thinks they will only play for a few minutes. In fact, many of the games are designed with a time-based component which essentially stops a user from playing for hours at a time. These same games also have a pretty quick refresh rate, allowing a user to play a few minutes every hour, for example. Over time, those few minutes can add up quickly, especially when a person plays several different games.

Using PVS and SecurityCenter, administrators can quickly determine the extent of employees playing these games, wasting both time and computer resources. With a custom dashboard created by Tenable which uses data from our collection of PVS game detection plugins, administrators can better visualize the social media’s game activity on the network. Based on your organization’s policy, this may indicate violations requiring action by management.

Tracking Facebook Games

You can download the SecurityCenter dashboard template by visiting the Facebook Games entry on the SecurityCenter Dashboards blog.