Employer e-mail and internet monitoring

What methods are used by companies to monitor e-mail and internet use?

 

Depends on what type of Network they have set up and what software they have installed.

 

Well, I think that most internet usage monitoring is done via software at a firewall or entry point to the company's network. I don't know a whole lot about the kinds of software that are available but I know that a lot of it ain't cheap and most of it probably logs every packet that is send. How much someone monitors the logs is probably the big variable. If it's good software it will raise flags whenever someone goes and looks at porn, downloads files, etc.

As for email, I think that's probably done at the mail server with software. Don't know much about that either, except I know the government does it on keywords. I have a friend who was writing an email to another friend who works for the Navy. He was complaining about the plutonium shipments coming to SC and so his message contained a phrase that said something like "what kind of democracy is america when a governor can't keep plutonium out of its borders?" The Navy's mail server, ahem, bounced that back pretty quick.

The best thing anyone who's concerned about email and internet monitoring at work can do is try to buddy up with the sys admin or something like that and see if you can find out through casual conversation......techies need friends, and if you're fairly computer literate, they appreciate talking to you.

 

I know Spector (e-mail and chat monitoring) and eBlaster (browsing monitor) are pretty popular.

 

Would there be any files installed locally on machine, such as log file that the network would read at log in?

 

Well, I think there's some software out there that records keystrokes and stuff, but I'm not sure if that can tell all that much - if you're going places on the net there's no way to record the mouse clicks.

I do know that there is a piece of software, I think it's caled Watchdog or something like that, that someone can install and it runs as a service in the background. It takes a snapshot of your screen at prescribed intervals (like maybe every 5 seconds) and makes the screen shot available to an admin on a remote machine. So they can see what you see, all the time. It's sneaky because the only thing that's on the local computer is an executable (I think they put it in the system folder within the windows or winnt folder) and a registry entry that starts the process on bootup. So only someone savvy enough to know that there's a funny process that doesn't belong when looking at Task Manager would be able to figure it out. It's got a cryptic name too, something like sym32i.exe, so it looks like it belongs.

I check my Task Manager every so often, looking for weird shit. If I find a service or process running that I don't know, I go somehwere like groups.google.com and serach for it, to see if I can find out why it's there and what it does.

 

Our company runs the networks in our accounts. What me worry?

 

Windows 2000 Server Logs all your I-Net access anyways

 

How?

 

It only happens when the Admin sets up a person folder for each user on the server... which most companies do... they allocate network space for each user... when they do that it creates and logs ALL of their cookies on the system server