Keeping an eye on employees

By Ellen Messmer, NetworkWorld.com, 01/18/06

United Kingdom-based insurance and pension corporation Royal London says it's going to deploy the 3ami Network Security monitoring and auditing system to keep track of everything its 2,900 employees do at their desktops every day. Royal London's group IT security manager Nick Harwood explained how it's going to work.

The 3ami monitoring and audit system resides on desktop computers to record and timestamp every action the user takes.

"There's a keystroke logger that captures keystrokes, it tells you whether the Windows system or Internet Explorer browser is in use, and it also caputres screens," says Royal London's group IT security manager Nick Harwood. "And it captures e-mail and attachments in a form that can be retirved."

Harwood said the U.K.-based insurance and pension company just completed testing it with a limited user group and expects to soon deploy the 3ami software to all employee desktops. As in the U.S., U.K. firms are required to notify employees of monitoring activity.

Harwood says employees by in large are not objecting to the firm's intention to monitor every move they make on the desktop. He notes that the intent is not to review employee desktop activity every day -- that information will be centrally stored but it's not practical to look at what 2,900 employees do every day, he adds. Rather, the intenti of using the monitoring software to store this desktop-usage data for use as an "after-the-event detective tool" if any perceived security violation takes place.

The 3ami monitoring and audit tool presents yet another approach to watching over data and what employees do with it. Other approaches include data-leakage prevention software, as it's sometimes called. More about that can be found here and here.

Back to Security Notes

Comments

Monitoring/auditing technology may or may not be enough of an incentive to prevent insider attacks ie. the disgruntled employee who is off the beam so to speak.

Once your trade secrets are shipped to a foreign country, isn't the damage already done? Better to have a technology that prevents internal breaches in the first place.

Posted by: R_U_Trustified on January 20, 2006 12:58 AM

Post a comment

Name:


E-mail address:


URL:


Comments:


Remember info?