Monitoring Internet Usage
 

Some of the guys that I work with have been told to lay off the internet as they are using it to much.

Is there away around being monitored?? or are we all screwed?

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

Do some work. ;)

Lunch time and breaks are for internet use. :D

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

There's almost always a round these sorts of things, but without knowing how they're measuring your internet usage at the moment it's a bit hard to tell what you'd want to be hiding.

Jambo

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

set up a sly virtual machine

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

I'll keep that in mind.. we shall call that 'Plan Z' :rambo:

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

For example connect remotely to home PC and surf via that??

Please explain.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

im interested in this as were monitored through a proxy. would be interesting if you could get round it

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

You need to know the infrastructure that is in place and what they are reporting on guys.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

download a piece of software any u can find that sets up virtual machines and basically you run a machine inside your machine vistually they won't be able to monitor what you do in the virtual machine

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

They can monitor network traffic. So unless you want the vm to just sit there and be all secret, and not connect to anything, then umm... won't work.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

they can yes but they may not depending on how much they have spent to monitor. and that method isn't great as id u have to download say a pdf or something it could show you as having more traffic than others but u are actually doing your work and spending less time on the net than others.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

ooh , slightly on topic - to give the guru a picture form the other side of the fence. I want to monitor my users traffic as the mongs are maxing out the bandwidth, best tool for the job?

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

We have a situation of internet access abuse, so in the browser setting we only allowed certain sites. Fortunately the mongs that work here are not clever enough to get around it.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

If you are being monitored it will be for a reason, more than likely company / hr policy.

If you are trying to bypass the proxy or monitoring solution, I'd be very careful technically anything is possible. However you get caught bypassing the monitoring solution what will your line manager / hr do to you then.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

Nah we're lax about them checking the mugbook and scrotmail it's just the idiot that sits there downloading crap and streaming vids all day. One day this week bandwidth jumped by 3 gig

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

Which you don't know, which is exactly we would need to know the infrastructure. Being found to be doing something to circumvent the monitoring in place would be a much more serious breach of the IT policy than to be spending too much time on the web. It'd be a disciplinary hearing, not just a quiet "lay off the internet" chat, so don't give the guy advice that could get him into trouble at work if he decides to trust your information and follow it.

It's ike playing slot machines only when you know they are about to pay out, to cheat any system, you need to know the system.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

Similar to us. We can access ebay, you tube etc but not BBC iplayer (so no more radio) facebook, bebo (social networking sites) etc are blocked by 'Websense'

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

I'll just keep going as normal until I get pulled. I've not had the 'lay off the internet' chat so hopefully they were downloading stuff or something which has flagged them up.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

Not wanting to sound big headed but I look after the network for a large establishment and we have hundreds of computers and laptops connected and we can tell who's connected, what machine they were on, where they went, at what time, and what they downloaded. We can also dynamically block what sites users can get to, and what types of protocols, applications they can use. We can tell if a rogue machine has been added to the network and that will normally be blocked automatically. Most organisations, except the smallest, have something similar so your chances of being hidden from monitoring are virtually zilch, Even if you remotely accessed your home machine it would show up as Internet access

I should imagine that you have been asked to reduce it as your employer has seen too much Internet activity during normal work hours for non work purposes. If that is the case then you are lucky as they can be far more aggressive in handling the problem than just a request.

There is also another reason why organisations stop Internet access to all but the necessary sites etc and that is to stop Virulii, trojans, etc being brought into the establishment. and onto the network, though one of the worst culprits of this are USB flash drives. Hence many organisations block USB flash drives, as well as to stop staff removing data from their networks and passing onto others.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

point being, a virtual machine does nothing to protect you from network monitoring, as it has to use the same network. It might get around workstation monitoring.

btw your employer/IT dept could quite easily monitor your entire network for a total software investment of £0. Don't judge everything on cost.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

The thing is we do use the internet to connect to our web mail and other applications which are accessed through the internet, not intranet or private network.

So there will always be internet activity including downloading pdf, excel, word etc attachments.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

I am only able to get round my companies policies though a VPN connection that routes all network traffic to/from my home network outside of the normal corporate intranet. I then have two ways of working, though a squid box and set my network proxy, or easier to remote connect rdp,vnc etc to a machine on the home network and internet from that.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

We had a guy that tried a similar thing. He got it wrong and managed to route the entirety of the network traffic through his home ADSL line. Bear in mind this wasn't just an office - we had a large and busy in house server room. Might as well have just pulled the plug on the whole place.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

only way round it I can see is to use a 3G dongle/tether a mobile with a proxy server and route all non-work internet sites via that.

Could be a pain to set up but...

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

Use logmein, uses port 80 i believe, they wont be blocking port 80 typically.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

but if they're monitoring, they'll be monitoring port 80 for sure, and it possibly goes through a proxy - which might mean it won't work at all. It does definitely mean that they'll detect the huge amount of bandwidth a remote access program uses when compared to normal web browsing.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

Sure but they wont know what actual sites he is frequenting other than logmein, if they tell him to stop using it he then should comply :-)

Just get mobile internet would be best, on your own device even better.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

100 % correct regarding the disciplinary proceedings. There are also open source products that can do virtually every thing that most small operations want, so the company may have spent very little or nothing more than time, and still have a reasonable web filtering and proxy setup.

I think the problem arises from the fact that many people think that it's their right to access the Internet at any time they want to. A few months back one of our users was incensed that they could not access their personal e-mail account, and stated it was their human right to. We had not blocked it on purpose, it was just that hotmail had changed their access procedure, so our filter had blocked it. I pointed out that they had perfectly adequate organisational e-mail, but of course they had made a personal on-line order and were awaiting an e-mail so it was our fault. They were absolutely gob smacked when I told them that we did not have to provide access to their personal e-mail and that many businesses block all but their own.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

Does logmein require a locally installed agent, or Java client, etc? Many organisations audit the PC's and report unauthorised software being installed. I've had to give up using MSN, as I install it for use at home, then every time I plug into the network in an office for more than 10 minutes, it's gone again! I only have admin rights on my laptop 'cos it's Vista 64bit and not the companies standard XP build and they chose to skip Vista. When I get Windows 7 it'll be a locked down standard build and it'll drive me daft.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

you could allways get an, wait for it

















IPHONE, lol.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

logmein is all done via web client, the application is installed on the pc you want to control

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

Indeed it is, thats the beauty of it, its very flexible regarding protocols too.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

Ok, I didnt mention but I work in a sensitive environment with the possibility of explosion. NO mobile phones permitted. Therefore no iphones.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

Id of thought a pc more hazarderous when its powered on and off lol.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

Lets be realistic here. None of us have any god given right to personal email/internet access at work. The company I work for has just tightened up on personal internet access, but they're still not bad. They've blocked access to a load of dubious sites, started monitoring visited sites, and block streaming other than at lunch time. If people take the p*ss then they can expect to be clamped down upon. Quite a few large organisations are now employing computer forensic people to check up on employees that they suspect to be abusing company policy.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

To be fair I'm not bothered... I can access everything that I require, the Org, personal email, banking etc.

My main concern was the amount of time. I have the org on my browser nearly all day, I do obviously have it minimised when Im working so I would hope that it would only 'clock up' when the brower is actually open and in use if you know what I mean..

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

I do think any organisation that bans private email address access are ********s.
If you mess with the system too much and you get a techie on a powertrip they may well ring the plod on you.


Edit: I didn;t even think that was a naughty word!

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

Can I ask why :confused:

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

you can do this with VNC also. But you need to configure it. Hell, I could easily get RDP going over port 80 - but i'd expect any half-decent proxy to lob these out, cos they're not http.

Re: Monitoring Internet Usage
 

TEc- Just seems wrong, I know technically you have no right but for the past 8 years I've always known I can check my mail at atleast the next lunch/break and deal with whatever crap's in there. If it was banned from me it'd be weird, then again it won't be for the forseeable future so I'm not worried :D