Instant Message, Instant Transcript

shams42 writes: "Although the internet has been far from private for some time now, it seems that public awareness and concern over this issue is mounting. This article at CNN discusses the issue of companies monitoring instant messages for cyberslacking or leaking company secrets. There is also the possibility of them being included as evidence in court cases."

Comments

Traffic analysis

[driehuis]

Even when you encrypt your traffic, it will not protect you from traffic analysis.

I happen to be the dude in between management and the users on my site. I refuse to eavesdrop on my users. Not all of my users realize it, but we've got a pretty liberal policy (don't break the law, don't be offensive to others, don't use excessive bandwidth during business hours; that basically sums it up).

Some of my users know me for cracking down on porn or MP3 downloads, and think I'm reading their every keystroke. Because if I wasn't, then how would I know that they were doing stuff that they weren't supposed to do?

The reality is, when I get complaints about Internet performance, I run some quick scripts on the logs to find out who is hogging the system. If, after eliminating the obvious business use connections, I'm left with a top ten and number two is downloading a gazillion of .xls spreadsheets from an server in Poland and all the URL's have /..%20%20/ in the path, I give that user a call.

Usually, the user will accept the lecture that his contractual obligation to stick to the corporate guidelines is not optional. I sometimes learn through the grapevine that such a user thinks I'm a fascist. So be it. If other people can't work because of egregious abuse, I have to intervene.

Do I even look at the stuff they're downloading? Not if I can avoid it. The only times I look at what they're downloading is when they start yanking my chain, giving me the go around that there is no law against downloading Warez or porn. Maybe there isn't, I've got no clue. I do know what's in their contracts though.

Most of these issues are dealt with amically. People sometimes don't realize how big their impact on the corporate network is, and even if they do I usually let them get away with it if the abuse stops. They're usually pretty happy when I tell them I've got no clue what they were downloading, but could find out when forced to.

Over the last year, IM became a bit of an issue because of the way their stupid tools communicated (if only they used persistent connections they'd fly right under the radar). At some stage, 30% of our proxies capacity was used to serve a few dozen IM sessions and it really started to hurt web performance.

It's always funny when they let it escalate to management level, and I can at that stage let them rant about the invasion of their presumed privacy, and then drop the bombshell that I didn't even look at what they were downloading, and that it was trivial traffic analysis that gave them away, and that the reason they were in that meeting was because they incriminated themselves.