I’m in a bit of a curious situation. THey’re really cracking down on misuse of computers (though I fail to see how surfing the web for an hour is any different than, say, a one hour personal phone call or visiting the office of another employee for an hour about personal matters).
Today I got an email from the next level up IT saying their system detected a PC on a remote project (connects via a VPN router hooked to local ISP) running Limewire and to remove it.
Well, I logged onto the PC remotely and looked and there’s nothing on there that’s not supposed to be. I looked at the program files directory, where Limewire installs by default, and the “modified date” on the directory was a few months old (the modified date coincides with the date I installed some other software on the machine), so I don’t think anything’s been removed recently. I also checked the registry and history, cookies, etc. and found absolutely nothing unusual.
I even checked two other machines using the same router, even though they had different IP addresses, and there was nothing there either.
The only thing that was “unusual” was the fact that the times they showed me on the log for the “IDS sensor” (apparently what they use to monitor packets) showed the illicit activity at 4:00 yesterday, yet our server’s logs showed the user logged off at 3:24 yesterday and didn’t log back on until 7:06 this morning.
These are XP pro systems, and are locked down, meaning that admins are the only ones who can install anything or change any major settings, and authenticate to the domain, so I am at a loss. This happenned once before at this site, everything the same except all of the PCs have been replaced since then, and THAT time they claimed it must’ve been hackers (???)
But that’s not what this is about. This is about the fact that their monitoring software is obviously wrong, and since it is wrong now, it has probably been wrong before. And this software’s reports have been used to discipline employees… anywhere from several day’s pay to several weeks!
I have absolutely no doubt that many employees have been unjustly disciplined, losing hundreds or thousands of dollars of pay in the process, and that bothers me big-time. But I have no proof, and if I raise a stink, I will become a target…. damned political hacks!