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Programs that Log User Activities

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Just real quick here… My company is trying to do this whole big philosophy change type thing. Part this is they are cracking down on the low-end producers of each department, the “trouble-makers”, the gossip hounds, etc.

Well I think some of this is good stuff and its about time to be honest.

Anyway, I am getting a flood of requests now from department directors and managers to monitor the email and web activities of specific users and/or at specific time periods. With this data, in some cases , it will decide the continued employment for some employees.

The trick — it has to be stealth (invisible to the user being monitored) and it has to be relatively cheap. Finally, if I had to pick between what is more important to monitor web or email I’d say email is the priority, but web is something I’d like to also watch.

What solutions are out there for this stuff that doesn’t cost a small fortune?

PS. Right now we are using a basic filter on our firewall and we are combining this with security audit logs from our domain controllers.

Topic

Pearl Echo

In reply to Programs that Log User Activities

Check out Pearl Echo. Can block inappropriate sites or set time restrictions on use. Can manage email, chat IM, ICQ and news group postings and provide detailed access profiles to you. Allows automatic links to visited websites, and can restore all text from outbound and inbound communications.

Rather easy to implement and cheap considering its value.

Dozens of solutions

In reply to Pearl Echo

My former employer used one that was passive – all internet traffic went through it but it was transparent to the user. All usage went into a database and you could do all kinds of queries against it. The vendor also provided updated list of sites to block by catagory – allowing you to customize a message for the redirect “Caution you have attempted to access a blocked site etc.”. You could also block individual sites as needed. It didn’t track keystrokes but did assess an average of 20 secs per click and then assessed time by usage on that basis.

The challenge becomes who has to do something with that data – my vote is anyone but IT.

James

[Author]

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