am I being watched?
 

there is a rumor circulating my office that individuals internet usage is being monitored... so the MD can see how long we have spent on sites... :eek:

does anyone know if this is possible for a small non-technical company with no IT budget to achieve? I know we have WatchGuard keeping us from viewing certain sites... but I wasn't aware it could monitor 'who, what and when'

Anyone got any experience of this..?

gotta go... someone might be watching me :)

cookies..cookies...cookies.

OS X's tcpdump can do it, so I'm sure there are others. IP NetMonitor, for example, gives a pretty face to tcpdump.

aww... now you got me hungry.

It sounds like you guys are using WatchGuard's proxy server. Monitoring your internet access, visited sites, duration, etc. etc. is all built right in. If the person who is acting as your office techno-geek knows what they are doing they can see your entire history...

When faced with a similar scenario (IT & boss reading ALL emails), I brought a phone modem to work and did the personal stuff off their server/network.... slow, but private. Of course, it was all during my lunch hour or before/after working hours. :)

rule number 1 of existing in the modern world: privacy only exists because people politely avert their eyes; otherwise it's a moot point. I just had to bust 12 students for cheating because (silly them) they thought they could be sneaky on their computer quizzes without me knowing about it, and I'm sure there are people farther up the chain from me who could know literally everything I do if they had some reason to look.

c'est la vie... :)

I work in a locked down (K-12 education) environment. I can not only track down who is doing what, I can see the last user who logged in, what IP address it was issued, the current running processes, an inventory of every application installed, how many software updates are available, the hardware specs of said machine, so on and so forth.

On top of that, I had to lock down internet history as well so the users can't delete it. I hate being the internet police but I have to when the bosses and higher ups say, what has this user been doing?

And is it possible to find out what I was talking about with people via icq/AOL?

Do you mean like ChatChecker? :cool:
Yes, AOL and ICQ are both transmitted in plain text over easily monitored ports.

aha!.... I have full access to the WatchGuard (the bosses dont know)... so I might just wipe the logs!

Thanks! That's what I wanted to find out

I use the gmail chat client via HTTPS, FYI

gmail I don't know about, but I know that AOL monitors all chats that go over its servers. secure encryption isn't going to help with that, I don't think.

Secure encryption does help.

Instead of the filter seeing
It see's something like this:
Well, not really, but you get the point. There would be no point in encryption if someone could intercept your encrypted connection and magically see everything in plain text.

Anyway, what was once encrypted can be easily deciphered, so if anyone needs to find out what were you talking about, he will

except you have to consider what this 'secure' encryption is encryption between... SE is just intended to prevent interception in transit over the net. now if gmail is completely peer to peer (i.e. you are sending an encrypted message straight to the person you're talking to, and it's decrypted on their machine) that's good, but if it's server-based then it's likely that your messages are decrypted at the server and then re-encrypted for transmission to your friend. for anyone at the server, it's plain text.

let me give an example of operation. Our web filter, filters out chat apps and chat sites from going over the interwebs. If I change the URL from http to https while in gmail, the web filter can no longer decipher that I am doing chat because it is encrypted and allows the traffic.

The admin *might* be able to tell if you are chatting, as he might see a connection to, say, "https://chat1.google.com/" for example, but can't actually read what you are chatting about.

I have seen filters block both secure and unsecure connections, so I'm guessing either the admin isn't smart enough, or the filter isn't advanced enough to block encrypted connections.

regardless, that still doesn't tell you whether the gmail people have access to it.

well I am not the admin of the filter another guy in my dept is. However, I know its finicky with HTTPS, and we had to lax it due to some online banking the accounting company does.

Photek is just wondering if the company's filter can monitor his internet usage. The answer is yes.

Google accessing your account is a totally different situation. You can't really tell if Google's been spying on you. Although the privacy policy basically states that they won't spy on you, they own the servers, so it is possible someone from Google could spy on you if they really wanted to, but it's unlikely they are.

Depends on the company ur working for