The 2018 FIFA World Cup is underway and is expected to be the most watched sports event in the world: in person, on TV, as well as on small screen and big screen internet-connected devices.

With many World Cup matches scheduled during work hours, we’re here to help strike the right balance between productivity and cheering on your favorite teams. Palo Alto Networks released a custom App-ID on June 12, for US-based customers, which will allow firewalls to block FIFA or safely enable streaming, depending on the preferences of your organization.

Our US-based customers can use the custom FIFA World Cup App-IDs we released to monitor network usage, protect it from malware and apply QoS as required to minimize the impact on your business applications. The Live Community post provides more details on how to obtain custom App-IDs, suggested best practices, and also show how to use Wireshark and browser tools to test the FIFA custom App-ID.

We understand that many regional websites will broadcast the FIFA games as well. So, we recommend customers create custom App-IDs for the sites streaming the FIFA World Cup in their regions using the regional URLs. You can use our Community Live article to follow the step by step approach to use those regional URLs for your own custom App-ID. Customers are also encouraged to share those custom App-IDs with other customers using Palo Alto Networks Live Community.

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