Uh oh – BroPro
Guess what I discovered this week with the Chromebooks in my classroom?? Well, if you see the picture above this post, you probably can guess – BroPro. This is a VPN Chrome Extension. It basically lets people (students mostly) get around the school’s web filters to visit sites that they shouldn’t such as games, social media sites and so on. You might be thinking Well I will just report this to the IT department and they will block it. That is a good idea, and exactly what we did at our school, but then something weird happened.
You see once it was blocked, it did not delete the extension from accounts. the BroPro extension was still there but it couldn’t do what it was supposed to do and so accessing any website became impossible. It kept returning an error about the proxy setting. Now here is the real weirdness. This extension, though only installed on one user profile, affected the entire system. So no matter who logged in, BroPro kept them from accessing any websites.
As a teacher, we can’t manage our students accounts (believe me – this is a good thing), so here is how we got around it. On the login screen for Chromebooks anyone can delete a user account from that particular Chromebook.
When you delete a user from a Chromebook it will also delete all their user data from that computer. This means that the BroPro extension will also go bye-bye and thus return the Chromebook to working order. Check out the link below to learn how to delete a user from a Chromebook.
Now when you determine who has installed the extension, have them remove it from their account!
Source: IT Babble Blog and Podcast
