Stayed at a Hampton Inn this week, and hooked my company laptop to the hotels Ethernet hookup.
A screen for Hampton came up, and I was able to zoom through the Internet.
Question: am I still going through my companies website to donwload stuff . . or through Hampton Inn’s? If I downloaded something that was against company policy, will it get tracked?
Not that I downloaded anything that might get me in trouble after having 10 beers . .
Hey, at least its better than "a friend of mine has this problem . . . "
You are using the hotels network, not your employers. Your employer would need to look at the logs, cookies, history files, etc on you laptop to tell what you had done.
Unless you were using a VPN and a proxy server from your employer. Then they would have their logs.
But, since you didn’t mention a VPN, no. Your employer doesn’t know.
Not sure what a VPN is, but I do know I couldn’t get onto Outlook, so I think I’m ok.
I guess I should mention that I’m a little paranoid because I’ve been having trouble connecting to legitimate websites at work because of St. Bernard software, which I think is new to the company. But, when I tried using a remote dial up at home, I couldn’t connect to a lot of sites either, but got an error message instead. Is it possible that the Hampton Inn web service screwed up my laptop?
I guess if I get called on anything, I could always explain that I didn’t know the rules applied for a hotel web service, I don’t do stuff like that in the office, I’m sorry blah blah blah. It is kind of embarassing. It is NOT like I sit on the computer all day websurfing. This was like at midnight, in some hotel, and well, its a long story!
St Bernard software sits between your computer and the internet and filters traffic. It refuses traffic based on pre-defined sets of rules. It will not see what you did in the hotel.
Are you saying that, after your stay in the hotel, you noticed strange behavior from your laptop and your internet experience? If this is true, search the boards for threads about spyware, adware and the measures used to prevent/remove them. Seriously.
Is your homepage set to something embarrassing? Are there strange icons on your desktop that simply won’t go away? Are you getting redirected to strange search engines? Even if you don’t have these symptoms, check your laptop for unwanted programs.
Besides checking for and, if necessary, removing spy or adware, update your virus definition file and run a virus scan on your hard drive.
Clear your browser history and cache. Get rid of any cookies that are stored. Google for history kill and the like.
Once you have checked for spy or adware, scanned for viruses (using an updated definition file) and cleared your history/cache/cookies, you should be good to go. If you still have problems, you can call your support organization for help. You will not have gotten rid of all traces, but as long as you were not looking at anything illegal (underage sex, rape sites, highly sensitive communication with some terrorist cell), you shouldn’t worry. They’ve seen it before and probably have better sites bookmarked. And, they are not likely to go looking for traces. There won’t be a forensic investigation, they just want to fix what ails you.
Don’t worry. Check your computer. Take basic precautions that have been suggested in the other threads. Give a couple bucks to a homeless person. It’ll be okay.
