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Looking for a “Big Brother” program

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I’m not sure how the rest of you feel about “Big Brother” programs. As our network administrator, I don’t like them. I always feel like I am invading somebody’s privacy when I use one or if I am asked to report on somebody’s email activities.

In any event, I have been tasked to purchase and install software that will monitor use of our internet. I am running MS Proxy 2.0 on the same machine as our Exchange Server. So basically, the server is taking a beating (yes, this would be a good time to recommend an upgrade, but I just took a huge chunk of my buget with some switches I bought) Therefore, I only want to be able to monitor a few users a time and not the whole network.

Anybody have any software recommendation??

Thanks in advance,
Bill Blunden

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Looking for a “Big Brother” program

In reply to Looking for a “Big Brother” program

i’m not entirely sure what exactly you’re going to monitor. there’s a tool that i have written (but which has never gone out of alpha) that does quite a lot of low-level accounting. we used it to track internet usage for the three companies that shared our uplink for billing purposes. it also tracks single hosts and protocols used to identify those reckless surfers and emailers.
to avoid abuse, the actual content is not analyzed in any way, and all traffic is only stored per source OR destination host (and protocol), but *never* both. so you can find out who’s doing a lot of web browsing, but not which sites they have gone to.
if you’re interested in this, please email me at step@acm.org for more details.

Looking for a “Big Brother” program

In reply to Looking for a “Big Brother” program

Looking for a “Big Brother” program

In reply to Looking for a “Big Brother” program

Hi, check out Languard at http://www.languard.com
you can download a free trial to see if it suits your purpose. If it does, the license for a few users is very reasonable (of course, more users, more $$). hope this helps.

Looking for a “Big Brother” program

In reply to Looking for a “Big Brother” program

Looking for a “Big Brother” program

In reply to Looking for a “Big Brother” program

The best one I’ve used is a program called Webspy. It is very specific and you can view sites that have specific words in them, or you can view a user’s viewing habits.

Webspy has a view that will pull up any site that has the 7 dirty words (you can add your own too).. once you’ve found who went where, you can then view a users entire history. It’s pretty good, and takes alot less time then going to the text logs yourself!!!

it’s at http://www.webspy.com

hope that helps.

Looking for a “Big Brother” program

In reply to Looking for a “Big Brother” program

Looking for a “Big Brother” program

In reply to Looking for a “Big Brother” program

We use Surf Control Scout (www.surfcontrol.com) It is priced by feature and is a bargain for mid-sized companies at $695 for a version that audits but doesn’t block. It will monitor http, ftp, smtp, nntp, and others and log it to an access or SQL database and categorize them as well. I simply run a report on “adult” sites and I can see all of the traffic/times going there. Best of all it integrates with NT security to put names with traffic and does not run on a pass-through configuration.Meaning you can place it on a workstation at the last link to the Internet before the proxy server and it simply captures all of the traffic. I run it from a standalone PII with 128 MB of RAM and it captures 100 users fine. I think it even has a plug-in specifically for MS Proxy. They have a full time-restricted test version to try. Keep in mind though that network architecture plays a part, if you plug it into a switch or a bottom level hub it won’t be able to see all traffic. I created an analysis port on my

Looking for a “Big Brother” program

In reply to Looking for a “Big Brother” program

Thanks for all your suggestions!!!

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