It’s a fact of life in the 21st-century workplace: The boss may well be watching his employees, especially if they use a computer. Bosses are using two types of spying software: network-based programs that monitor all traffic passing through a system, and programs that sit directly on an employee’s desktop.
Vericept Protect is an example of the first type. The software searches all correspondence for any indication that employees are accidentally or maliciously communicating sensitive data, and blocks it. Vericept also claims it can examine the tone of an e-mail to detect job dissatisfaction. Someone who sends a message saying "I hate my job." or "You’re not going to believe what my idiot boss did today." could be poised to upload company files in anticipation of leaving the job.
Vericept makes products to monitor other Web activities as well. Paul Pilotte, a senior product manager at the company, says it helped one fend off a harassment suit filed by a senior employee who claimed someone had left printouts from an website in her office. The company planned to give her a large severance package (解雇费) until it used a Vericept tool to examine her Web use. That search found that the employee had printed the pages herself. On another occasion, Vericept helped catch a worker who had installed a keylogger on a manager’s computer to extract the boss’s passwords.
One product that monitors an individual desktop is NetVizor. It can record everything a person types, from bank passwords to the names of illnesses searched on WebMD. It also logs and monitors e-mails sent and received, instant message chats, and the names of documents opened or printed. It can even capture a snapshot of a computer screen, providing an employer with a replica of what the employee is seeing on his or her monitor.
Kelly Todd, information-services security yst for Securities America Financial Corporation, an independent broker dealer with several hundred employees, won’t say what kind of software his company uses. But he does say as soon as "somebody types an e-mail and hits Send, before it even gets to the central e-mail server, it goes through a system that archives the e-mail".
In a 21st-century workplace, what is used by the boss to monitor his employees’ computers