Anyone know if it's possible to play Spotify on your work computer when hooked up to their network? Firewall seems to keep me from connecting to the internet but I don't have access to adjust the firewall properties.

This is obviously an employer-specific issue, but if your work has blocked spotify then it is probably a good idea to not find a way around it.

Lol

The problem I used to have is that it installs into the user/local/appdata folder. Executables running out of this folder is something that some viruses will do, so there is frequently a group policy that forbids executing anything out of that folder.

Once it goes through the install, you can go and move that folder somewhere else and it will usually work fine.

They usually don't expressly disable it. It just installs into a stupid place so it gets blocked by other policies.

We definitely target Spotify and similar apps because it's a major strain on the network when everyone is streaming crap. We do it through content filtering through DNS (Cisco Umbrella).

I imagine regardless of how its blocked (DNS, firewall, GPO, Applocker, etc), you would need admin rights to work around it and it'll show up on an audit. If you're not friendly enough with your IT group where you can't just ask to be whitelisted...I probably wouldn't do it.

It's like that at my work, we just connect our phones and connect to the building wifi. they don't block it there.

Appreciate the feedback.

I'll just keep using the phone

Wildmen03 said:

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It's like that at my work, we just connect our phones and connect to the building wifi. they don't block it there.

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It's not too well blocked then. If they were concerned about bandwidth usage, you'd think they would block it on mobile devices too.

I imagine the Wifi is a completely different circuit. Usually want that separate from the main network for security concerns if anything. But yeah, would think that it would get hammered as well.

We don't really filter anything on ours as it's mainly for outside vendors/personnel who have too many different requirements to manage. But we do strictly control access to it.

Seems like you would create a guest network for vendors and whatnot. It'll depend on your use case, but we always had a bunch of employees floating around the building using laptops over wifi that would need access equivalent to a wired connection and vendors who just needed mostly unrestricted access to outside resources.

The company I was working at was medium/large but they didn't have great computer security policies.

Yeah, I'm sure it's different everywhere. But wifi opens up a lot of vulnerabilities...we may be stricter than most since we have PCI compliance concerns.

Based on the penetration testing stories I've heard, the wired network ports may tend to be left more open than they need to be, which leads to problems if the tester can gain physical access to the build and be left unattended.

They could conceivably work on gaining access to a WIFI connection from outside the building though.