How does a boss check which sites his employees visit?

Question

My coworker likes to surf the net at work. I told her to be careful, because it's possible for her activities to be monitored. She thinks clearing history,cookies, and tempfiles will cover her tracks...is this true?

Answer 1

If you work for a larger company, or a tech savvy company, odds are they have monitoring software on the servers. This software records every single site accessed and the amount of time spent there.

If you work for a little company with an "old school" boss, odds are clearing the history & cache, etc. would work fine.

So, do you want to beat her? Or join her?

Answer 2

Your boss probably does not check directly, however, your company's IT department has automated tracking software which monitors this and can generate reports for your boss, detailing web sites visited and for how long, as well as recording all keystrokes (no joke!). Clearing stuff at least removes the appearance of direct evidence from machine, but as long as she is on the network, which she must be to use the net, the tracking software is running and her activities are being monitored, so they have evidence anyways.

Answer 3

Thing 1: There are monitoring tools that many employees use that track internet use. These tools run on the Proxy server that allows connection from a PC in the company to the internet and keep every site you visit and when they were visited.

Thing 2: Even if you delete files on your computer, they are still there and you can easily pull this data from the hard drive.

The best policy is that if you are not sure if these tools are being used, just don't do it.

Answer 4

He doesn't necessarily need to look at the traces (browser history, cached files, etc) on her PC to see what sites she is/has been visiting. As the HTTP requests from her PC go across the corporate network they can easily be logged.

She could use a free web anonymizer service to hide the individual sites that she visits. Basically you browse to the anonymizer's HTTPS site, enter the actual URL you want to visit on their page, it fetches the page and sends it back over the HTTPS connection so it is not possible for eavesdroppers (the boss!) to see what URL was requested or the page that came back BUT they can still see that she visited the anonymizer's web site and can therefore deduce that she has been visiting inappropriate sites for a business environment.

Many companies (my employer included) use content filtering engines that automatically block access to all sites deemed inappropriate for business use, including web anonymizers.

Answer 5

If there is monitoring software in the computer it will most likely show up in running processes. Press Ctrl,Alt,delete at the same time. A small window will pop up. Click on Processes. Not sure what the name would be but just google some of them and you may be able to find out if it is installed.

Good Luck

Answer 6

your company will have a server (the thing you log on to every time you do some work) and when your boss logs in to it as the administator then he will be able to see what all other users have done EVER. Nothing can stop him from finding out what your on. clearing history and cookies would probably make him suspisious anyway. Be careful what you go on. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!

Answer 7

I work for Feds and in our computer help center they can do something and see on your screen exactly what you are doing on their screen in the help center if they want to. Thats why I do most stuff at home, not at work.

Answer 8

no there is monatoring software your boss can and probably does use especialy if you have a server