IT questionFollow

Question for all the geeks out there....

How can you tell if your employer is monitoring your internet usage at work? Any programs you can find running in the background? Processes that give it away?

I'm sure that over the years, my employers have enough racist/sexist/stupid comments to fire me 100 times, but just thought I would ask.

Just assume that they are.

S'how I do it. Completely transparent to the user and stored in a database for easy query. I also have a copy of every single piece of email that goes into or comes out of this office.

I wouldn't track anything unless there was a complaint. I don't like the idea of sifting through millions of records looking for possible **** links or millions of emails looking for people chatting about their exboyfriends sister's cousing being a *****.

So they could basically have records of every post I've ever made? Besides the comparing user name to the posts I mean. They can tell everything I've entered into text boxes?

I've never looked at anything bad, just curious really. And now I don't feel very comfortable doing any sort of banking/bill-paying from work if that's the case.

While it's a technical possibility, the chances of that are fairly slim. Rarely does tracking involve content so much as source and destination. So they would most likely be able to sas "Neph went to X site Y number of times on Z date." and even that is a bit nebulous. Also, if your IP scheme at work is set up for DHCP it could be even harder to track things back to a specific machine depending on the rules set for lease expiry.

I somehow convinced my boss 8 years ago to let my computer stay as a standalone computer. Only one monitoring my computer is me!

DHCP = Automatic assignment of IP address to each machine on your network.

IP Address = Unique numbered identifier for a machine on a network.

If that's the case, the IP address of any machine has the possibility of changing from time to time. So while you might have one IP address today, it might be different tomorrow.

If your Netadmins have the IP addresses set up static then they will always know which machine has which IP address and can track things back to a precise location.

Crappy Analogy time!

Imagine 10 people working in a building. Each morning when they come in to work, they grab a badge at the front door with a number on it, from 1-10. They always take the number on the top of the pile, regardless of which number it is, and always in the order that they arrive at work.

After a job is complete, each employee signs the number of their badge to the job.

Now, let's say one guy come in to work early one day and gets a different number badge then he usually gets. Now all the jobs he completes will have a different number than he would have written the day before. The same holds true for anyone else that shows up at an off time.


That's sort of how DHCP works. The only exception of course is that the protocol generally requests the IP address it had prior to expiration.

Chances are your IT person is fu[Aquamarine][/Aquamarine]cking off on some other forum anyway.

Or you could just download your **** at home.

Yes and no, just of every time you've click a link. Reply to fifty messages and you'll have fifty entries in the proxy log. In my company's proxy setup all we do is look for high volume traffic ( actual GB's transferred or # of connections ) and review it. It's rare that we stumble on anything so outside the norm that makes us come down with the hammer. Granted I'm talking traffic allowed by policy, adult stuff has it's own swift retribution.



Only if they were targeting you, doing it for everyone flowing through your company proxy isn't cost effective. Key logging on your desktop would give them this info also. lol But as much as you post you'd heard about it by now. :)



This comes back to what browser encryption you're using at those sites. Once you've logged on to a secure site, the data stream going from your browser to the site isn't something that your average company can break into easily.

Zium

Edited, Wed Jun 7 16:14:22 2006 by Zium

At the office where I work, there are only 8 of us. We have static IP addresses so we can remote access our work computers from home.

To the best of my knowledge, we only have Norton Antivirus & our Windows xp built-in firewall protecting our system.

Neither system creates a log, do they? I am curious, mainly because I don't care for my boss to see how much time I spend surfing the internet, but also since I am in charge of 3 others, now I want to see if they have been slacking too.

Thanks.

I don't believe the XP security firewall logs the hits like the more complex firewalls do. They could still check your cookies and temp internet files to see what sites you're visiting, but they don't list how often or how much time or anything.