Why YSK: It appears several Lemmy Instances are flagged as suspicious and at least 1 instance intentionally using the name of ransomware. A couple of the big enterprise monitoring suites (Fortiguard, ZScaler) will flag your account and may end up with you being pulled into an office for an explanation, or worse.
TL;DR: Keep browsing to your local instance at work for now.
Serious question: there isn’t any tracking software installed on my work computer, and I use a VPN browser extension. Is it still possible for my employer to see what I’m doing?
I’m a systems admin. Last week, I had an employee using a VPN to try and hide their traffic. My monitoring software caught it. I couldn’t see the traffic, but I could see it connected to a known Tor IP. My system saw the fishy connection and sent the alert. Just be careful and don’t assume you’re completely safe with the VPN.
It’s best to assume your IT department can see everything you do, and keep personal stuff on personal devices.
How could you see it was connected to a known tor IP? Would you not just see the IP of the VPN server and not the final destination?
And VPN servers are often flagged for all kinds of shit because some use them for tor or spam.
I think he meant the VPN target was a known tor IP as well
Yeah that kinda sounds like FUD to me as well. He wouldn’t see anything BUT the VPN.
Yeah, it doesn’t read very clear. I’m assuming they meant that the destination IP was for the VPN server and that some deep packet analysis determined that the encapsulated traffic was TOR-bound. Or it was a wild assumption that they were using TOR and they use it synonymously with VPN.
Either one of these events (unauthorized VPN or TOR connections) would be reason enough to look more into the employee’s IT resource usage.
You’ve got it. I have an NDR I mirror packets to and it picked up the connection. I think the guy hit a Tor IP before connecting with NordVPN, but I do remember seeing the connection to Tor that sparked the alert, followed by the traffic to Nord. Either one of those things would have triggered an investigation into the user.
Forwarded that to my security team and washed my hands of it. Wish I knew why users pull stuff like that on company resources. If they just did it at home, I wouldn’t care!
Depending on the quality of your IT department; it’s quite possible that tracking software could be on your work computer and you simply cannot detect it. And yes, corporate tracking can easily detect what you are doing even if you use a VPN. It’s best if you simply use work computer for work only. Don’t even check gmail on it. Don’t even link your google account in your browser.
Depends on who owns the network as well and if you’re connected to a corporate VPN. The rule of thumb is that you can’t expect privacy if you’re not the sole admin of that computer.
If you use a vpn, I don’t think they can see your traffic
Depends. They might have a proxy in the network config or DNS or any number of non-network based methods of logging and tracking.
Security software isn’t tracking software. It should be able to hook into every current semi popular browser without you being able to disable it.
On the other hand, allowing users who don’t know the answer to the question you’re asking to both install VPN software and allow them this kind of traffic is a compliance violation to begin with.