SmoothWall is first vendor to offer content-based blocking of Flash-based games

In recent years, flash-based online games have become extremely popular. According to Comscore, online game sites pull in over a quarter (28%) of the total worldwide Internet population with the average online gamer visiting gaming sites nine times in every month.

Organizations need to block online games to prevent users wasting time and preserve valuable bandwidth. Schools also have more serious concerns about the depictions of graphic violence, gore, criminal behavior, and even virtual sex, which many popular games contain. Even seemingly innocent games aren’t beyond suspicion, since (according to CEOP) online interactive forums are now popular places for pedophiles looking to find and groom young victims.   

Filtering online games is a complicated science.  Most web filters have a ‘gaming’ category, where known sites are listed and blocked. But such methods are a long way from foolproof. Game site operators are now going to increasing lengths to hide sites and offer users more ‘discreet’ ways to play. Determined gamers have also learnt how to outsmart school filters with less obvious searches (such as searching for just swf) and by embedding their favourite flash games into legitimate looking sites.

Although many filters offer the option to block flash files altogether, this is rarely a practical fix.  According to the Opera Browser Development Center, over a third of all websites now use flash and schools are now increasingly reliant upon a variety of flash and video-based learning resources. 

Web filtering vendor SmoothWall says the only viable solution is to inspect the actual content of flash files so they can be blocked or allowed based on what they contain. Product Manager Tom Newton said:

“In recognition of the filtering challenges online games pose, we have extended our Dynamic Content Analysis technology to encompass flash files, so we can rapidly scan their content and accurately block or allow them in exactly the same way. We can also identify a number of different flash applications (including malformed flash files) and we hope to include more categories as the technology matures”

Released today, the latest version of SmoothWall’s Guardian web filter also benefits from outbound (egress) filtering, more frequent updates and a number of flexibility and scalability improvements.   Existing users will get the new functionality via a feature pack download.  For more information visit www.smoothwall.net