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Employee Monitoring
CWmike writes "Michael Workman, an associate professor at the Florida Institute of Technology's Nathan M. Bisk College of Business, estimates that monitoring responsibilities take up at least 20% of the average IT manager's time. Yet most IT professionals never expected they'd be asked to police their colleagues and co-workers in quite this way. How do they feel about this growing responsibility? Workman says he sees a split among tech workers. Those who specialize in security issues feel that it's a valid part of IT's job. But those who have more of a generalist's role, such as network administrators, often don't like it. Computerworld contributor Tam Harbert found a wide variety of viewpoints from IT managers, ranging from discomfort at having to 'babysit' employees to righteous beliefs about 'protecting the integrity of the system.'"
To add to that, who actually browses porn at work. I mean, every few months, I hear a story about some politician or city employee being caught browsing porn on work hours, and I just think wow. Is your job that boring? Is your life that boring? Of all the things there are on the internet that won't get you in quite so much trouble, they choose to look at porn. Not that there's anything wrong with doing it on their own time, but they have to just know it's going to end up badly. When I'm bored at work, I visit lots of non-work related websites, but I just really don't understand the porn-at-work thing.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
As a security professional in a VERY large company, you'd be amazed how many people go to porn sites on work computers. For some people, it seems like porn is like an addiction. They crave that "stimulation" so badly that they can't wait until they're somewhere else, or perhaps they don't have a computer at home, or perhaps the only computer at home is in a public area where other people can see what they're doing. There are many reasons why someone would chose to do something like that at work.
They also don't seem to believe the warning on the computer when they log in every morning telling them that we ARE monitoring their activities.
The problem is that new sites pop up all of the time, so trying to block them is like the old "whack a mole" game at the carnival.
I found one company-issued laptop with 16GB of porn videos, including kiddie porn. That was immediately turned over to the proper authorities and, if my information is correct, the former employee is now in prison.
Greetings and Salutations....
A few years ago, one my my clients asked me to generate lists of the websites their employees had been on, and, how long they had spent on the sites. Since I run an in-house DNS server, not that hard to get. Well, I ran the reports for a few months, then, the project was quietly dropped. Why? It turned out that the only folks that spent significant amounts of time on porn sites and other non-business sites were the President of the company (who had ordered the reports) and his wife, the CFO of the company.
And THEY were burning a LOT of time on non-business related entertainment and shopping!
What was really amusing to me about this was that these two folks had the attitude that they were the only ones doing anything positive for the company, and, the employees were the enemy - and were spending all their time trying to steal time and resources away from the company, cutting down on profit margin!
Regards
Dave Mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/