This week we installed a Barracuda Web Filter on our network. During the testing process, I set a Group Policy on one of our departments (which is basically our equivalent of a Call Center, which means they are also the lowest paid and more prone to myspacing and downloading viruses and animated emoticons) to use it as their proxy server. I knew that they were abusing the internet, (numerous clean-ups of viruses and spyware were my first inclination) but I didn’t realize the full scope until I started viewing the logs.
The company I work for has never had web filtering or tracking. They didn’t view it as important, trusting their employees on basically on “internet honor code”. It’s taken about a year to convince them to buy a web filtering/reporting system and that’s only after I showed them how much time is spent cleaning up malware. Oh, and the rampant pornography surfing helped convince them as well.
Even though I’ve worked in IT for over 6 years, I still continue to be surprised, nay, impressed at the audacity of employees and what they surf at work. Personally, I’d never go to streaming porn sites while at work, but apparently some do. I also wouldn’t spend all day on Monster.com, but again, some of my fellow co-workers do. Even as I type this, someone is searching a few auction sites furiously for a Nintendo Wii.
I feel like a child with a new toy. Very rarely since I’ve been here have I been able to get something that we needed and that would make my job a little easier, to say nothing of making the day a little more entertaining. Now if I could only get them to agree to removing users from the Administrator group on their local PCs – well I’d be very happy indeed.
