Monitoring Web Use

E

ERage

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Nov 7, 2005
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I need to monitor web use on a machine in my office but I do not have the luxury of controlling a router. What is the best way to watch web traffic if you can't track it at the network level? I could export IE history every so often but I suspect this person will be clearing out their history now that they know they are being monitored.

Is there any other way of tracking this information? Can I prevent or disable the IE history clearing function?
 
change their hosts file to point the 100 most traveled websites redirected to goatse...problem solved
 
w_a_w said:
change their hosts file to point the 100 most traveled websites redirected to goatse...problem solved
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already done, except we are redirecting them to our homepage rather than goatse.


But seriously, in order to ensure that they aren't just visiting proxies or other sites not on the list I have to be able to monitor history. If I can prevent them from flushing it then that's the best thing. i have a great little application that exports a report of IE history.

But if they just flush it out daily then no luck. Theac suggested wireshark which is really just a new version of etheral to montior packets, but that seems like overkill.
 
Onnotangu said:
ff portable for me.
have you simply thought of disabling their webacccess?
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If I could I would, job duties require certain web access to be available...but no defined white list of sites.

So far I have cut the majority of her inappropriate use by redirecting facebook and myspace to our lovely homepage.
 
I thought I had posted this earlier but I guess it never went through...

They put Webblocker on our computers awhile back and every time you visited a bad page it would yell "BLOCKED". So you learn to either keep your speakers off or just stop visiting sites that might be blocked. It was the most annoying thing in the world and they cannot have admin priv cause you can just install FF as Jpat pointed out. I walked into the IT room and asked for the password in which for some reason they gave to me and I disabled it, lol. Other than that there is not much of a way around it, if you end the process you cannot get to the internet. You will probably have to allow certain sites that get blocked but its quick. I dont know if that helps
 
Sp`ange said:
Ask the user: "What sites do you need access to?" Give them access to those sites and that's it.. They know that they aren't supposed to be surfing. You know they're not supposed to be surfing. Don' pussy-foot around it and just do it.
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I've got it sorted out. It's not technically my employee...just someone who works in the same area as me whose computer is my responsibility to keep clean. Our director is usually pretty passive so I was worried I would have to continue to find a technical solution to this problem.

Finally, the director is going to man up and confront this individual and she'll be formally written up on file here and in HR. I mentioned the possibility that she might start clearing her history but he assures me she will not...if he wants it checked he expects to see at least 3 months of history at any given time. He's going to explain this to her and if she fails to meet these criteria, it will be grounds for termination. I guess he's serious this time.

I hate sneaking around on someone, especially since I dick around plenty during the day...but this individual has consistently missed deadlines, and tried to go behind our back to get someone else to come into the office and undo that which I did to prevent her access to unauthorized pages. At least I get my work done while I screw off during the day.
 
ERage said:
t least I get my work done while I screw off during the day.
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26047b79caaa2553.png
 
ERage said:
BIOS? If they disabled the USB ports, I'm sure they have the BIOS settings locked down too. That's a tricky one to get around there. :(
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I'll check when I get in on Monday. This place has every program except IE running through Citrix.

I can't install a damn thing on it. They also block every website known to man... luckily gmail so far is okay.
 
ERage said:
BIOS? If they disabled the USB ports, I'm sure they have the BIOS settings locked down too. That's a tricky one to get around there. :(
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They can be locked down in XP too, and if you aren't an administrator, you're fooked. (At least mass storage devices can be blocked)...
 
April25 said:
Would I have to install anything? Hmm... you may be on to something.
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Nope, nothing gets installed with any linux live cd distro, unless you want it to. The only potential issues I can see is if the optical drives are not set to boot before the harddrive. And if they disabled the boot menu (usually hitting F10 on boot brings up the boot menu so you can select the optical drive).
 
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