I have Ghostzilla installed on a USB Memory stick which I bring in to work. Whenever things get slow at the office, I just plug it into the back of the PC, fire it up, and start my stealthy surfing. But is there any way for our office IT manager to detect what I’m doing? If I’m running it off the memory stick, won’t that make my illicit surfing “extra-invisible”?
My problem is that I have no idea how they would keep normally tabs on our internet access. I know that I’m probably asking for serious trouble if I start up Internet Explorer and start surfing porn, but how do they know? Do they get a little notification whenever someone goes on-line, or do they just have a sort of filter that notifies them if an address with certain key words crop up (like “Busty” or “housewives”)
How does Ghostzilla manage to be so stealthy? If I use it to keep surfing the SDMB when I should be working, will they still be able to catch me out?
I’ve never used Ghostzilla but as far as I can see all it does is make a web page not look like a web page to people looking over your shoulder. It doesn’t change how the web page is fetched. All your memory stick means is that they’ll not be able to find evidence of Ghostzilla usage or surfing on your machine, there will still be an electronic trail leading up to your machine.
As your internet connection probably goes through a server that your IT department has access to they can see all the requests and responses. This includes web pages visited, information transmitted, etc, etc. Now how much of this they choose to keep is up to them. If they care they’ll have alerts for access to blacklisted sites, or transmission of trigger words in either direction. Otherwise they may just keep some basic access logs for a week or so in case people complain, productivity drops, or some other warning sign is noticed. Even more basic they may just monitor the amount/timing of traffic and not care as long as it remains low.
It’s a lot to do with policy, how much time and experince the IT department has and how much control they have (i.e. if your network was put in by a third party you’ll have whatever systems, logging and alerts that they added).
There are ways and means to be less detectable (and discussion of them isn’t permitted on this board I believe) but in the end a smart IT manager will know that you’re fetching something from the internet, even if they couldn’t pin down what. This would led them to either confront you, just block external access or to set traps to find out more information.
